I don’t have much to do with children these days. Friends and relatives send me photographs and videos of their children. I save this material carefully: I like comparing the face of a newborn with what he or she has become at eight months, at two years, at three. I have no photographs of myself as a newborn; the first image goes back to when I was two. Whereas there’s not a day in the life of my granddaughter that has not been entrusted to the future, thanks to her parents’ mobile phones, which are always within reach.

And thanks to these photos and videos, I could describe in detail how the form of the newborn has become the form of a child. If I were to make a film out of this material, I would get an interminable but impressive documentary on the instability of our bodies from birth – the way they continually take shape and lose shape, how they explore the possibilities in an effort to understand what to become, but never find a fixed form. Not to mention crawling, learning to stand upright, the infinite attempts at language, the manipulation of objects: there is a lot you could do with this abundant crop of family images.

Naturally, only the marvels of the child are documented. Beauty triumphs, along with appeal, charm, joy, happy laughter. The videos break off as soon as the child screams, gets angry, turns ugly. Missing is the distress, tiredness, irritation, fear, tantrums. Missing are the tensions between the parents that alarm children, and heighten their uneasiness.

Occasionally, a video begins when the child has just stopped crying and, her features again relaxed, she is ready for play, even though one eye is still slightly veiled by tears. There is very little that documents the painful side of growing up, of childhood unhappiness and the effort of existing. If the mobile phones were allowed to do their work on that as well, what grim videos would we have? Taking shape and losing it would become an unpleasant spectacle, with horror-film moments.

I use the word “spectacle” deliberately, because all these materials are produced not only as a document; they also seek an audience. Parents of single children – or sometimes two children – in presenting the best of their offspring present themselves at their best as fathers and mothers, and they do it for uncles, grandparents, actual friends and virtual ones. Of course they put those bits of happiness on stage; the rest they leave in the wings. Living it is already arduous: imagine filming it.

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The result, perhaps, is that my granddaughter, when she tries to locate, in this inexhaustible flow of images, her own “I”, unhappy like all of us, will have trouble finding herself, will wonder: if that’s me, so pretty, so lively, so capable, how did I become like this? The vast documentation will be as insufficient as my single photo of a two‑year-old, which only by convention I call “Me at two”. “Me” who? We’ll always know too little about ourselves.

• Translated by Ann Goldstein