Showing posts with label Photos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Photos. Show all posts

Friday, July 9, 2010

Ellie's Countenance

The great majority of the thousands of photos that have captured my two-an-a-half-year-old granddaughter Ellie, most all record her idyllic smile:


Yet I have been more drawn to the few photos that have caught a much more thoughtful countenance:

The smile is wonderfully engaging and can’t help but elicit a reciprocal response (one of the reasons, I’ve recently read, for an infant’s or toddler’s joy), but it is reaction to stimulus, a visceral response. The other look is a much more reflective, inquisitive countenance – a Robert De Niro “You lookin’ at me?” quality that I hope reveals a mind that is already skeptical but curious, wary but willing to see what else is out there, what’s coming next. And I hope that she can carry that – both the smile and the quizzical gaze – well into her future.