My mother has kept every photograph since 1998, arranged by year in identical blue albums, and last summer my sister decided to scan them all. It took her three weekends. Somewhere in the second weekend she said, without looking up, that Mum was not in any of them. We checked. Out of roughly four hundred photographs, my mother appears in nine, and in six of those she is partly out of frame, caught while moving away from the group. The explanation is not mysterious. She was holding the camera. She was the one who noticed that the light was good, who arranged us on the steps, who told my father to move slightly left. The photographs exist because she was standing behind them. My sister found this unbearable and started a project to correct it. She now photographs my mother constantly, at meals, in the garden, mid-sentence, and my mother finds the whole thing ridiculous and says so at length. What interests me is a question my sister has not asked. If we had a complete record, and my mother appeared in four hundred photographs like everybody else, would we know more about her than we know now? The albums are, in a sense, a portrait of her. Every choice in them is hers: who stood next to whom, which afternoons were worth keeping, when to stop. The pictures show what she was looking at, which is a form of information about a person that we do not usually count as one. She has not stopped taking them. This year's album has forty photographs in it. In two of them, taken by my sister, my mother is looking directly at the camera with an expression I would describe as tolerant. The other thirty-eight are hers, and they are, without exception, better composed than anything my sister has taken of her.