thing. She wants to document her family's quaint, primitive way of life to show the pictures to her more "modernized" friends. Dee is not wrong for being progressive, but she clearly misses the point of the real value of something like a family quilt or their way of life. The quilt represents family connection. The different pieces are sown together. Maggie would use the quilt as a bed cover, every day, literally and figuratively connecting her to her ancestors. Dee doesn't get this. She would rather take a picture of it.

In some respects, Dee takes so many pictures as a way to reflect her fundamental disconnect with her home.  Dee detests her home.  Such a sentiment caused her to leave in the first place.  When she arrives at the house, she does not approach it as a homecoming.  Rather, she approaches it as a tourist, in an almost kitsch type of demeanor:

Out she peeks next with a Polaroid. She stoops down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house.

Dee takes pictures as a way to communicate the disconnect from her mother and sister.  This is heightened with her name change.  The sense of awkwardness is communicated by her taking of so many pictures upon arriving.  

Another reason why Dee takes so many pictures is to collect items for her cultural reclamation project.  This sentiment is why she wants the butter churn as well as the quilts.  Dee's photographs are reflective of her desire to collect objects or possessions that reflect cultural identity.  Interestingly enough, Dee views cultural identity in a general and broad sense.  Dee still reflects a level of disconnect with the immediate culture of her mother, sister, and her home background.  Dee is more concerned with fulfilling the particular expectations of cultural expression.  Her initial pictures reflect this.  Dee's understanding of cultural identity is a way to create distance between the intimate culture of her background that she has never been able to appropriate.  Taking possessions and pictures of it is the closest she can get to it.

Dee has been estranged from her mother and sister for some time now. Her mother even tells us about how much Dee hated their first house and how she will likely hate the new house as well. Dee wrote once to say that "no matter where [they] 'choose' to live, she will manage to come see [them]." She clearly feels disdain for her family's living situation. One might expect that a daughter visiting her mother and sister for the first time in a very long time—and bringing home her significant other to meet them—would be anxious to hug and kiss and greet them. However, when Dee pulls up, she does not run to her family and offer affection. Instead, she goes immediately back to the car to get her Polaroid camera. Her mother says that Dee

stoops down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house.

Only after this photo shoot does Dee actually go and kiss her mother. Dee's bringing the camera and prioritizing taking pictures over greeting her mother shows the lack of respect she has for the work her mother has done and the sacrifices she made so that Dee could go to school and have the life she wants. Dee is more interested in taking pictures to show her "heritage" to people she wants to impress than she is in actually seeing her mother. Further, in literature, objects that obscure the sight (like Dee's camera and huge sunglasses) are often symbolic of limited insight, and this seems to be the case here. Dee cannot figuratively "see" what is truly important—her family, their memories and stories and traditions—and she only sees the material goods as possessing value.

When Dee returns to the house she grew up in, she does so as something of a fact-finding expedition: she clearly views the house and her family as curiosities, relics from an earlier age for African-Americans. Dee has decided, after having been educated in Augusta, to reject her recent heritage and embrace herself as an African. She wants black people to feel empowered to do more. Part of that is, for her, taking the trappings of the recent past and black poverty—such as the quilts which she wants to take to hang on the wall—and enshrine these in a museum, documenting the state in which black people have been forced to live. By snapping pictures with a Polaroid, then, Dee is presented as a sort of anthropologist, documenting the life of her mother and sister. Note that she always ensures the house is included in the pictures—she doesn't want just photographs of her relatives, but to create images of them against their cultural backdrop: black woman with tin-roofed shack.

The Polaroid, too, contrasts sharply with the lack of technology and modernity inherent in Mama's house. It indicates that Dee now belongs to a different world with new innovations.

The Polaroid camera could be significant for a number of reasons.  First, the Polaroid was a relatively new invention in the context of the story.  Immediately it denotes technological progression and therefore a separation of on generation to the next (here, mother and daughter).  Along the same lines of separation, one major theme throughout the story is the clear disjointedness of the mother-daughter relationship, as evidenced through Dee and her mother, and through the motif of eyes and eye contact used throughout.  As Dee takes pictures of her mother there is a symbolic element of her "seeing" everything all together.  She takes "picture after picture" and "she never takes a shot without mak' ing sure the house is included."  Ironically, though she takes several pictures of her mother and what once was her home, Walker makes a very distinct point that Dee doesn't really see her mother nor her home for what it is.  The Polaroid, therefore, an an aid which helps mask this view.

Finally, the Polaroid could be further scrutinized symbolically when you consider that pictures are developed immediately.  Rather than a reflection in a mirror, everyone who looks at a the picture a Polaroid takes has the opportunity to see the same thing at the same time, and relatively soon after the picture is taken.  This could speak to the stark irony in the fact that these two women, who should very well be looking at the "same picture" of things, are not seeing anything eye-to-eye.