As a photographer, I’m not ashamed to admit that some photographs bring me to tears. But recently, it wasn’t a photograph but an old compact camera that brought me to tears – a 20-year-old 6MP Canon compact camera, to be exact.
I lost my grandmother to cancer in 2023. A few months later, I lost my best friend to a cancer that she wasn’t even old enough to get the routine tests for.
The loss was a double whammy that left me floundering in so much grief that, when I inherited some of my grandmother’s art supplies and her old point-and-shoot, I shoved them in a box in the closet, not yet ready to face them.
Some time later, I realized that the old compact – a Canon PowerShot A540, which was introduced in early 2006 – still had a memory card inside. A few days ago, I slid some new AA batteries inside, took a deep breath, and powered the old camera on.
I had to roll back 20 years to set the time and date stamp on the camera, but it still functions as it did at launch. I pressed the playback button and scrolled through years of photographs that brought tears to my eyes.
The camera was full of memories that I shared with my grandmother, including a photo of myself and my then-boyfriend, who is now my husband.
That old compact camera held old photos of my cousins, my aunts and my uncles. It held snapshots of my grandparents' farm, where I spent my childhood playing hide-and-seek with my cousins and attempting to wrangle feral kittens.
But the camera also housed memories that were not mine, but my grandmother’s. The camera is a tool that shows others our perspective without words and, with that old camera, I was able to see what my grandmother saw on a cruise to Alaska, on trips to the beach and on days in her own garden.
The camera is the closest piece of technology to a time machine. I can’t go back in time and have a conversation with my grandmother, but I can hold the same camera that she did and see photographs from her perspective.
I can’t go back in time and hug my best friend, but I can rewatch the video that I have of her giggling while scooting down a snowy hill on the last trip we took together.
My grandmother wasn’t a photographer, but she was a painter. I once gifted her a print of mine that she told me she admired on the same Christmas that she gifted me a painting inspired by the same photograph.
I’d like to think that I have not just her old camera, but her creative spirit. And, with the photos from her old camera, I have a tiny slice of time that I can revisit in my grief.
The 6MP Canon PowerShot A540 is only worth about $25 on eBay – but the value in a camera lies not in megapixels, but in memories.
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