“There is no time; what is memory?” So goes the Zen koan. It sprang into my mind as I sifted through a box of family photographs recently and tried to make up my mind what to do with them. Ones like this for example.
This is my grandfather and grandmother with their first child, my uncle Bill, in a studio shot in the mid-nineteen twenties. My grandmother died about five years later from the tuberculosis which was endemic in the north-west in those years. My grandfather handed my uncle and mother on to his sister and mother to look after and took little responsibility for them thereafter. I met him only once or twice and, of course, never met my grandmother. My uncle is long dead, too, so here we have, more or less three ghosts who live on probably only in the memories of me and my brother now. The two heroines who took the children on were my great aunt and my great-grandmother. Here is the latter with my great-grandfather who was also dead by the time of my birth. They’re from the the generation before even the one above so I knew neither of these two either but there are several photos of them in the shirtbox.
Now here is the question: what is the point of keeping photographs of relatives that you either never knew; or who have been dead so long that you are probably the only living person to remember them? In our family’s modest collection there are maybe a hundred or so images. But who are all these ladies in cloche hats and men in double-breasted suits smiling self-consciously in front of charabancs and old motor cars? Who are these chubby infants in romper suits and Startrites, or staring blankly out of prams with leaf suspension? There is one of my father holding up a baby – but whose? Is it me, my brother, a cousin, a friend?
Here’s one of my Dad’s from the war.
I wouldn’t mind betting that every person in this photo is now dead. (As chance would have it, I was chatting to a chap a little while ago who runs a small RAF photography museum. He told me that as the WW2 generation dies off he is getting a lot of parcels full of these kind of old military photos but, unless there is something of clear historical value about them, he won’t keep them. He doesn’t have the room and, to be frank, if they are of no value to the family then why would they be of value to him?)
That’s me on the right with my brother at a Pontins holiday camp near Weston-Super-Mare in the early 1960s: a happy memory for the two of us - but of what interest when we are both gone?
My generation (born mid-twentieth century) may be the first to face this problem. Once Kodak had launched the Box Brownie in 1900 the impromptu family snapshot became commonplace (“Save your happy memories with a Kodak”). Photographs of our grandparents and parents through the thirties and forties were kept in numbers that were manageable. But now we have all those monochrome shots from the interwar years and the fifties, plus all the albums of our own families growing up – and there are many, many more of those. Mrs Barker and I have a full 15 albums on our bookshelves of our own married life. Our recent suggestion to our children that we should cull them down into one or two manageable volumes met with implacable resistance
But if we say that digital images really took off in the first decade of the 21st century, what many families will have is just about a century of proper, physical photographs stretching from the sepia, through the black and white to the full colour. What’s to be done with them?
I turned to the experts for advice – in this case The Oxford Companion to the Photograph – where I found this under the heading “Family History and Photography: “….we are often inclined to give these fading fragments the status of evidence. Yet photographs present a glistening surface of meanings to reflect and project upon, and contain myriad latent narratives. They are kept because of the part they play in confirming and challenging the identity and history of their users. Whilst contained within limited photographic conventions, a tension exists between the longed-for ideal and the ambivalence of lived experience.”
And you thought it was just a photo of your grandad? This is the kind of treacle you have to wade through if you are interested in the history of photography – vacuous phrases drifting out of a fog of confused thought. What the author seems to be saying is that even though family photographs can be very simple (“contained within limited photographic conventions” for heaven’s sake….) different people see them in different ways – which is neither news nor indeed restricted to photos of families.
I feel like I’ve got hold of a small root in the garden and that as I try to dig it up it gets bigger and bigger and as I pull harder and harder I suddenly realise that the garage wall is coming down because the root goes much deeper and farther than I had ever imagined. It does prompt in me the thought however that I cannot make this decision alone. These are family photographs, so the family must all be involved. I must therefore spend the next few months finding out what everyone else thinks. My tentative view would be that we might cull them and then make up one definitive album. If future family members decide they no longer want to keep it then that is for them. What will be the basis for the culling though? Should we keep photographs of family members we can no longer identify? And what about all those baby shots; and military groups; and football and rugby teams?
I think again of the koan. There is no time; what is memory? A koan has no rational answer. You are supposed to ‘hold it close’ until your response emerges. I write it out and slip it into our shirtbox of family memories. That seems like a good start.