One family photo, three versions made by the photo studio

We have one family photograph at home that was taken three times. Between the versions lie three generations of partings.

The first version was 2005. My grandfather was seriously ill that year, and the family decided to take a group portrait while he was still strong. Everyone gathered, and then we realized the picture would be missing one person: my grandfather's elder brother, our Second Grandfather, who had gone to Xinjiang decades earlier to work on the frontier. Four days on the train each way, and it was harvest season; he could not leave.

My mother had the idea. Bring a photograph of him and ask the studio to put him in. Digital compositing was skilled work in those days. Old Zhao at the studio took the black-and-white photograph Second Grandfather had mailed home twenty years before and worked on it for three days. When the print came out the whole family stood around it. Second Grandfather stood at the far edge in the old Zhongshan jacket from the photograph, his smile exactly like the living man's. My grandfather touched the paper and said, "Old Zhao. You have stitched the man back to life for me."

The second version was 2012. My grandfather was gone. My grandmother went quiet, and the composited photograph made her cry every time she looked at it. For her eightieth birthday the family agreed to take a new one. Everyone also knew that the empty place at the table would only make the picture hurt more.

My father went to Old Zhao again. By then the skill had become the studio's signature: completing family photographs, inviting the dead out of old pictures to stand in new ones. For my grandmother's portrait he deliberately chose my grandfather's favorite shot — the Dacron shirt, the big laugh — and set him half a step behind her chair, one hand resting lightly on the back of it. When she saw the print she put her hand on the place where he stood and said, "Old man. Still standing behind me."

Old Zhao said he had been in the trade forty years and that what he retouched was never the photograph. It was the gap. "When someone dies, the family has an empty seat in the middle of them. All I can do is draw a person into the seat."

The third version was last year. My daughter was born, the family assembled, and we went back to Old Zhao's shop. Old Zhao had gone from young Zhao to Master Zhao with gray in his hair, and the studio had passed to his son. This time there were two people to bring in: my grandmother and my grandfather.

After the test print, his son was adjusting details on the screen and suddenly frowned. "Dad. This old gentleman's tie fights with the colors in this one." Old Zhao leaned in and looked for a while. "Don't change it. Old Li's tie was his treasure. He wore it into the Great Hall of the People. Let it fight. It has to be him."

The day the print was ready, Master Zhao delivered it himself. Three generations, complete: my grandparents in the back row, my father and his generation seated in the middle, me at the side with my daughter in my arms. She pointed at the old people she did not know. "Who's that?"

I said, "That's your great-grandfather and great-grandmother. They're in the photograph, watching you."

Old Zhao was packing up his equipment. Without looking up he put in, "Little girl, your great-grandfather's tie — nobody else in this city ever wore one like it."

One family's arrivals and departures, kept in trust by one studio across three versions. Because of them, no reunion of ours has ever been incomplete. The people in the photograph came back, and once they are back, they stay.