Capturing Innocence

I took this photo when I was ten, next to the pond in the back garden.

There’s really not much of a story to it, at least not that I can remember. It’s been a while since I was ten. My family had just moved to a new home in the countryside of the Ards peninsula, Northern Ireland. It was a new build, so the house and garden were still barren, but the wild surrounding us was as rich as it had been for millennia. And that suited me. Minibeests twitched and twisted in the undergrowth, hares gambolled in the fields, songbirds chirped in the trees and the occasional heron flapped overhead. And at night, we saw bats and badgers. There’s no feeling like glimpsing a badger trundling through your neighbourhood.

It only took me about a week of exploring the needly forest of gorse behind us to discover ‘the Frog Place,’ a secret swamp jittering with an infinite supply of frogs. I’d often lead my friends and cousins there and we’d gather buckets of the little amphibians, competing to see who would catch the most humdingers, then we’d carry them back through the gorse and empty them into my pond. There were frogs everywhere back then: in the pond, the garden, the fields, the gorse, and especially the Frog Place. Moses himself couldn’t have summoned more frogs. They even got into the house once or twice.

The gorse is gone now. The quagmire still lingers, but nothing jitters among the reeds anymore.

Anyway, it was around this time that my dad bought me a camera, and like every preteen behind a lens I took my photography career very seriously. I mostly took out-of-focus pictures of bumblebees and empty branches where a songbird had perched moments before. These things happened from time to time in the life of a serious photographer, of course.

Then I stumbled upon these frogs.

We all know what they’re doing. This photo was obviously captured in March, because that’s when croaky ballads fill the air and frogspawn fills the pond. Darwinian lust overcame them, fiery passion made their cold blood hot and they succumbed to their carnal urges in a grapple of moist skin and grasping limbs. Right outside the kitchen.

Of course, little ten year old me didn’t know that.

When I wriggled down on my belly to look at these slimy wee critters I saw grins on their great gummy maws, laughter bubbling in their throat pouches and glee shining in their bulbous eyes. They were friends cavorting about the back garden, giving one another piggy-backs and showing off in front of the other frogs. They were clearly just having fun. That much was obvious to a boy still in primary school. Why else would they be doing it? Look how smug they are.

So I took the picture and delivered the couple into the pond to join their fellow amphibians. I think it might be the only decent photograph I ever took with that camera. My dad was so amused by it he sacrificed a little of his cherished printer ink and made a copy for me.

He gave me ‘the talk’ not long after. Ever since, when I uncovered love-makers in the garden I knew fine rightly what the slimy wee hallians were up to.

But the photograph never changed for me. I have it on display in my studio, and I know that when strangers come in and see this picture of mating frogs they raise an eyebrow. But even now, nearly twenty years later, I don’t see it as sex. I never have.

People often talk about photographs ‘capturing a moment in time.’ I suppose that’s true, and the moment I captured was an intimate one. But photographs can capture so many things and, frankly, ‘a moment in time’ is the most boring one to focus on.

This photograph captured the wonder and mirth of its young photographer in the instant the shutter clicked, and stretched it into his late twenties. And how marvellous is it that it captured the innocence of a kid who stumbled upon a couple of horny frogs in flagrante and assumed they were just two friends enjoying a piggy-back with silly big smiles stretched across their gubs?

Not that there’s anything wrong with what they were really doing. Of course not. But frogs mate because their instincts compel them to. They used to give piggy-back rides for nothing but the fun of it, like my nieces spend summer afternoons blowing dandelion seeds into the wind or dropping pooh sticks into a river and chasing them downstream. There are few things more innocent than doing something harmless and silly just because it’s fun.

I see a great beauty in innocence that I’ve never been able to discover in anything else. It’s a unique and precious beauty. But once its mellow light is snuffed out it can never be rekindled. Beautiful. Precious. And worth preserving for as long as we can.

So I didn’t see sex. In my wonder, mirth and innocence all I saw was frogs having carefree fun.

The frogs are long dead. All the frogs of my childhood are. I looked it up: common frogs only live for eight years and they were already at least three years old at the time.

The frogs aren’t the only things that are gone. The colours in the photo are still vivid, but so much of what it captured has been bleached into nothingness. My big gorse playground, the youngster with a now-obsolete camera that fancied himself a photographer, my memories, so much of my wonder and mirth. Gone. The fun, too. Sycamore helicopters, grasshopper concerts, dancing butterflies; they used to be just for fun and now they’re all about sex.

But worst of all, I’ve lost so much of my innocence since I was ten. I like to think not all of it, that there’s still a glimmer of that smooth, golden light behind my eyes, but the innocence I’ve already lost has dissipated into the void forever. I know I had to shed it to mature and join the world. But still. I mourn it.

Then I see this photograph tucked into my bookshelf in its tidy, white frame. This photograph — this snapshot of two long-dead amphibians taken by a boy scuffing his knees in the gravel — captured so much more than just a moment.

Within it I still feel the stirring of the child-like wonder I once had; the wonder of adventuring through a treacherous maze of thorns to find an uncharted swamp hidden in the Ulster countryside. This picture still carries the balmy scent of a billion yellow gorse flowers, long after that prickly jungle was uprooted and burned, and the land ploughed into a featureless brown prairie. I can hear the echoes of my own mirth; mirth in taking up a bucket and hunting for the plumpest, juiciest big blighter of a frog with my childhood companions; mirth in finding two froggy friends playing in the back garden just for fun.

And it captured my innocence. That’s something no man can hold onto or ever get back once it’s gone. I’ve long since lost that honeyed glow, but I still have this photograph of a couple of cheeky frogs piggy-backing in the sun. I still have the ghost of my innocence locked in a frame. I still have this photograph.

And it gleams.