SUNDAY WITH PHILOSOPHY JANE | We Take Pictures of Things We Never Look At Again

By Philosophy Jane

MINNEAPOLIS, MN (October 4, 2026).

At 6:43 on a perfectly ordinary Friday evening, Brenda told me my dinner was getting cold because I was photographing it.

This was true, but I felt she could have allowed me to discover it independently.

“Hold on,” I said.

I moved my water glass. The glass had done nothing wrong. It had been sitting quietly behind my plate since the waiter brought it, but through my phone camera it suddenly looked enormous, as though I had ordered salmon beside a municipal water tower. I moved it six inches to the left.

“No,” Brenda said.

I looked up. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You said no.”

“I’m just watching.”

There are few things more irritating than an old friend saying she is “just watching.” It means a case has already been opened and she is allowing you to generate additional evidence.

I returned to the plate. The restaurant had brought me a beautiful piece of salmon with roasted vegetables and potatoes arranged in the careful little formation restaurants use when they want you to understand that nobody simply scooped this onto the plate.

I took a picture.

Too dark.

I took another.

Brenda’s hand was in it.

“Could you move?”

“My hand?”

“Yes.”

“From the table?”

“Just for a second.”

She slowly lifted her hand, and I took another picture. Then I decided the water glass looked better where it had been.

Brenda watched me move it back.

“Are you documenting dinner,” she asked, “or preparing it for sale?”

“Presentation matters.”

“To the salmon?”

I ignored her. The next picture was nearly perfect except for a butter wrapper near the edge of the frame. I removed it. Then the little candle on the table seemed crooked, so I straightened that.

Brenda picked up her fork.

“Don’t.”

She froze. “What now?”

“Your fork.”

“My fork is bothering you?”

“It’s reflecting.”

“Jane, it is silverware.”

“I know what it is.”

“I wasn’t sure anymore.”

Eventually I got the picture. It was beautifully framed. The salmon looked excellent, the vegetables looked as though they had retained professional representation, the candle was straight, and the water glass had been returned to its original jurisdiction. Brenda’s hand had been successfully removed from the proceedings.

I put the phone down, and she looked at my plate.

“You got it?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Because your food has now been through a full portrait session.”

I picked up my fork. The salmon was lukewarm, but I ate it anyway. Then, before taking the second bite, I picked up my phone to look at the picture.

Brenda stared at me.

“What?”

“You’re looking at a photograph of the dinner that is sitting directly in front of you.”

“I’m checking the picture.”

“The fish is still here.”

“I know.”

“You could check the fish.”

I put the phone facedown.

I have never looked at that photograph again.

The Investigation Begins

The next morning, I needed a photograph I had taken of a receipt.

I could not find it.

This is one of the great achievements of modern technology: we can now preserve virtually anything forever and then lose it immediately.

I opened the photo library on my phone and started scrolling. There were thousands of pictures. Not hundreds. Thousands.

I stared at the number for a moment because it seemed less like a photo collection than a census.

Somewhere in there was a receipt. Unfortunately, it was surrounded by my life.

There was the salmon from the previous night, followed by another dinner and then another. I found four photographs of the same sandwich taken from above, from the side, closer, and then from an angle suggesting the sandwich had retained legal counsel.

I had no memory of taking any of them.

There were birthday cakes, flowers, sunsets, restaurant menus, Christmas trees, concerts, people standing in front of buildings and people standing in front of other people standing in front of buildings. There were screenshots of recipes I had never cooked, a pair of shoes I apparently intended to investigate, a book I intended to buy, a chair I considered and a lamp I considered more seriously.

I did not buy the lamp.

I don’t even like the lamp.

Yet I had preserved it for three years.

Then came the parking spaces: Level 3 Section C Space 218, Level 4 Section A Space 406, a blue sign with an arrow and a concrete pillar marked B17.

These photographs had once served a legitimate purpose. I needed to find my car.

But the car had been found.

Years ago.

The mission was over, yet I had retained the intelligence. Apparently if federal investigators ever needed to reconstruct where I parked outside a medical building in March 2023, I was ready to cooperate.

The receipt remained missing.

Everybody Get Together

Eventually I reached the family photographs, which slowed me down because family photographs require considerably more labor than anyone admits.

Every gathering eventually reaches the moment when someone says, “We should take a picture.”

This sounds simple.

It is not.

The announcement immediately creates a temporary government.

Someone chooses a location. Someone rejects the location. Somebody else examines the light. Tall people are sent to the back, short people are moved forward, and children who had been perfectly happy five minutes earlier suddenly discover that standing beside their own relatives violates deeply held personal principles.

“Come stand by your brother.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to.”

“You were sitting beside him ten minutes ago.”

“That was different.”

Nobody explains how.

Someone is in the bathroom. Someone else has gone outside. An aunt is looking for her glasses, and a husband has disappeared.

“Where’s Michael?”

“I thought he was with you.”

“Why would he be with me?”

Nobody knows why Michael would be with anybody. We simply know the photograph cannot proceed until Michael is located.

Eventually Michael returns carrying a paper plate and no explanation.

Everyone is assembled. The photographer raises the phone.

“Okay, everybody look here.”

Half the family looks at the phone while the other half looks at the person standing beside the phone. One person blinks. A child turns around.

Michael is chewing.

Another picture.

This time somebody talks.

Another picture.

“Wait, I wasn’t ready.”

Another picture.

“Can you take one of mine?”

A second phone enters circulation, then a third. By the time the process ends, twelve people have spent nine minutes producing forty-three photographs of themselves standing against the same wall.

Then comes the review, which is where family unity collapses.

“Oh, no. Delete that.”

“Why? You look fine.”

“I do not look fine.”

“You look exactly like yourself.”

“That is not helping.”

The picture is enlarged, which is dangerous. Nobody should be permitted to zoom into another adult’s face immediately after telling that adult she looks perfectly fine. Suddenly we are examining eyelids at a level of detail normally associated with dermatology.

“Why does my face look like that?”

“That’s your face.”

“My face does not look like that.”

“It did at 4:17.”

Another photograph is selected. Someone objects to an arm. Someone else objects to a chin. Michael, who caused a six-minute delay by disappearing, looks excellent in every picture.

This creates resentment.

Eventually one photograph is approved, everybody agrees it is a good one, and somebody says, “Send me that.”

Nobody sends it.

Three years later, it remains on one person’s phone between a photograph of a parking meter and a screenshot of a coupon.

Brenda Has Records Too

I called Brenda.

“How many pictures are on your phone?”

“No.”

“I haven’t asked the question yet.”

“You asked for enough of it.”

“How many?”

“Why?”

“I am conducting research.”

“That makes me less interested in participating.”

“Just check.”

There was some tapping, then silence.

“Oh,” she said.

That was encouraging.

“How many?”

“I don’t think the number is important.”

“It became important when you said ‘oh.’”

She told me, and I laughed so hard I had to sit down.

“You have more than I do.”

“I have grandchildren.”

“That does not explain the other several thousand.”

“Some are recipes.”

“Have you made them?”

“That is not the point of saving a recipe.”

I was delighted.

“What was the last picture you took?”

“My lunch.”

“What did you have?”

Silence.

“Brenda?”

“I’m thinking.”

“You photographed it today.”

“I’ve had other things happen.”

“What did you eat?”

“I don’t know. There was avocado involved.”

“Why did you take the picture?”

“Because it looked nice.”

“And when are you planning to look at it again?”

“I’m looking at it right now because you made me.”

“That doesn’t count.”

“Then probably never.”

I sat back triumphantly.

There are few pleasures in adult life more satisfying than discovering that a friend who has been making fun of you is guilty of the same thing at a larger scale.

The Sunset Becomes Administrative

Later that afternoon, I went outside and saw one of those Minnesota skies that can stop you for a minute. The clouds had opened near the horizon. The light had turned orange and pink, with a deep purple farther up, and the trees were dark against it.

I stood there.

Then I reached for my phone.

This should have been the moment when the lesson arrived.

It did not.

I took a picture, but the sky on the screen looked disappointing. I took another, but the pink wasn’t pink enough. I tapped the screen and the picture got darker, so I slid something upward. The sky became brighter, but now the trees looked as though they had been involved in an electrical accident.

At some point, I became aware that I was no longer watching the sunset.

I was managing it.

The actual sky was doing perfectly well without supervision. I had appointed myself director of a five-inch electronic version that refused to cooperate.

A neighbor walked past.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Hold on,” I said.

I actually said that to a sunset, as though the sun had called at an inconvenient time.

I lowered the phone.

The sky had changed just enough that the part I had been trying to photograph was already gone.

I stood there feeling mildly cheated, which was outrageous because nobody had taken anything from me.

I had been there the entire time.

The Concert Archive Nobody Requested

The sunset reminded me of concerts.

I have videos from concerts that I apparently believed future historians would need.

In one, the performer is barely visible because the person in front of me has raised a phone. This means I recorded a concert through somebody else’s recording of the concert.

For thirty-eight seconds, the video contains three separate realities: the performer onstage, the performer on the stranger’s phone and the performer on my phone recording the stranger’s phone.

If another person behind me was recording my phone, we may have accidentally created an infinite cultural archive.

I played one of the videos.

The sound was terrible. The camera shook. Then a woman near the microphone began singing loudly and incorrectly.

I frowned.

Who was that?

The woman continued, half a beat behind the performer, having invented a third harmony nobody had requested.

Then I realized it was me.

I stopped the video.

I had spent part of an actual concert concentrating on creating a permanent record that I could not tolerate for fourteen seconds.

The Photograph I Didn’t Remember Taking

I finally found the receipt between a photograph of a grocery-store shelf and six pictures of a birthday dinner.

I should have stopped there.

Instead, I kept scrolling.

The pictures became older.

Then I saw my mother laughing.

I stopped.

I didn’t remember taking the photograph. It wasn’t particularly good. The light was uneven, something was cut off at the edge, and she wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking at somebody else, caught in the middle of a laugh by whatever that person had said.

I looked at the picture for a long time.

Then I found another photograph of friends around a table. One had moved away. One I had not seen in years. The child in the picture was much taller now. Nobody was properly arranged. A glass blocked part of somebody’s shirt. The table was cluttered, and someone had clearly been speaking when the picture was taken.

It was better than the salmon.

That ruined the argument I had been building all morning.

Until then, I had been treating the phone as a warehouse full of things I had saved without any intention of seeing it again. The sandwich supported my case. So did the parking spaces. The lamp was practically a confession.

But I had not known, when I took the picture of my mother, that I would someday stop on it.

That was the complication.

We don’t know which ordinary afternoon will become the one we wish we could walk back into for five minutes. We don't know which person at the table will move away, which child will grow up before we have adjusted to the previous height, which friend will become harder to see or which kitchen will eventually belong to somebody else.

And the photograph that matters later may be the one we would have rejected at the time.

The light may be wrong. Somebody may be blinking. A coffee cup may be in the way.

Years later, the coffee cup might be part of what you want back.

The Great Deletion

I decided to clean out my phone.

Not everything, because I am not unstable.

I was simply going to remove photographs I clearly did not need.

I began with screenshots. An expired coupon. Directions to a restaurant I had already visited. A blurry photograph of my shoe. The inside of my purse.

Delete, delete, delete.

Then came a photograph of an empty chair.

I hesitated.

Why had I photographed the chair?

Maybe there was a reason.

I enlarged it.

Nothing.

Just a chair.

Still, the fact that I could not remember why I took it made deleting it feel strangely irresponsible.

I kept it.

Next came two nearly identical photographs of flowers. The first had better light, but the second had slightly better framing. I enlarged both to determine which image deserved survival.

Ten minutes earlier, these flowers had been completely irrelevant to my life.

Now I was conducting a forensic comparison.

I kept both.

Then I found nine pictures of the same birthday cake. I deleted three, felt reckless and restored one.

After twenty-two minutes of serious work, I had removed thirty-seven photographs.

At that rate, assuming I took no additional pictures, the project would be completed shortly after my 143rd birthday.

Sunday Afternoon

Brenda came over the next day, and we sat at the kitchen table with coffee and muffins.

“So you’ve been cleaning out your phone?”

“Yes.”

“How many did you delete?”

“Thirty-seven.”

She stopped unwrapping her muffin.

“At that rate, your phone is going to be clean by the resurrection.”

“Some decisions require care.”

“You kept the lamp, didn’t you?”

I looked at her.

“How do you know about the lamp?”

“You’ve mentioned it three times.”

“I don’t even like that lamp.”

“And yet the lamp remains.”

She laughed, one of the real ones where her head tipped slightly back and her eyes narrowed.

Without thinking, I reached for my phone.

Brenda saw me.

“No.”

“Don’t move. Just stay there.”

She froze with the exact expression of a woman whose friend has learned absolutely nothing.

I took the picture.

“One,” Brenda said.

“I only took one.”

I looked at the photograph.

It wasn’t perfect. The coffee cup was too close to the edge. The muffin wrapper was visible. Brenda’s hand was halfway up.

A week earlier, I might have moved the cup, hidden the wrapper, adjusted the angle and asked her to laugh again.

But the laugh had already happened.

I didn’t need a better version of it.

So I put the phone facedown.

We sat there drinking coffee and talking for nearly two hours. I didn’t photograph the muffins, the coffee or the sunlight on the table.

Nothing terrible happened because these things went undocumented.

That evening, I opened my phone and saw the picture of Brenda caught halfway through laughing at me. The coffee cup was still badly placed and her hand was still in the picture.

I smiled and closed the phone.

About ten minutes later, I opened it again and looked at the picture one more time.

Then I noticed the lamp photograph directly below it.

I considered deleting it.

I really did.

But you never know.

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