“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

I’ve lived by these words since I was 13, when my grandmother left a collection of Mary Oliver’s poems on my pillow. I read the whole thing, cover to cover, and then back again, searching for something that could tell me what I was supposed to do. And then I came across this, a direct set of instructions, the steps for living.

I’m not asking you to take more pictures or to walk around all day looking at nothing. I’m asking, or telling you, or maybe begging you, to intentionally guide your attention. To recognize the things that matter to you, and really think about what that means. To look at your life deeply, and realize that someday, all of these photographs you’ll have will serve as a reminder of who you were, what you were and where you came from.

When I first started shooting film, there was a lot of landscape. A lot of just testing it out. But as I’ve gotten more involved, it’s become just people. Not random people, but people who I have, in some way, an emotional connection to. The photograph commands attention: the meaningful, intentional kind. It commands us to look deeply at the world around us and determine what matters.

The other day, someone mentioned to me that a picture I took offhandedly at a potluck had become their profile photo. That’s how you present yourself to the digital world. I took it with my film camera, got it developed, sent it to them and probably forgot about it. But they didn’t.

That three-way relationship, between the photographer, the camera and the subject is really important. It’s about deciding what matters. There’s a whole process involved in every single photograph, so each one matters because you don’t get unlimited amounts. What is deserving of me going through that whole process?

It’s just a representation. It’s not real life, and it never will be. But it has a strange way of bringing back a sense of: I was there. I did that. I existed at that time, in that place, with those people.

It always comes back to the fact that you are made up of your entire life and all the things you’ve done. And if there’s no way of knowing what that was, if you can’t remember it, can’t picture it, can’t understand what you wrote down 15 years ago, then who are you? What else is there?

At the summer camp where I work, one girl asked me once—during a beautiful sunset, almost tearfully—how she was going to be able to share this with her mom if she had no way of recording it. I told her to make a pseudo-camera with her fingers, click the pseudo-button and take a mental photograph. For the rest of the session, I would notice her, in quiet, silly moments, putting her fingers up to her face and making a small “click” sound. These moments were nothing significant. An afternoon in the cabin, or a walk to the waterfront: trivial moments I have probably experienced time and time again. But to her, these were moments worth remembering. That’s what this is really all about in the end. What is worth remembering? What will you remember?

I’d like you to imagine a scenario, 40 years in the future, when your memory begins to slip. You can no longer remember the name of your first imaginary friend, or who your sixth grade math teacher was. You won’t remember the first time you drove past the “Maine. The way life should be.”  sign on your way to Bowdoin, or the number of your room in your first-year brick. Slowly, the faces of the people you met on that first day will distort and fade, and with them will go the quad, and the buildings, and finally, Brunswick itself will seem entirely unfamiliar.

But then you find a single print.

A picture that one of your friends must have taken offhandedly. You’re lying on the quad, your roommate beside you. People are biking in the background, and there are hammocks in the distance. You can see Hubbard and behind that, Coleman. And just like that, you can recognize yourself again, face unweathered. The campus comes into focus, and that moment plays alive in your head again.

This is the power of a photograph. Everything you’ve ever had, everything you’ve ever done, the people you’ve loved: That’s all that you are. And photographs bring it back.

Anabel Schiller is a member of the Class of 2028.