by Brian Dillon
I have the photographs in front of me now. There are thirty-six of them: the first taken some time in the mid-1930s, the last in the summer of 1985. About a third of them – the fraction that I described in the notebook which I have also just unearthed – belong to my lifetime. I am present in almost all of these. The others, mostly black and white, show my parents: first individually, then, briefly, together, before I join them in various sunlit gardens and parks. I remember that as I looked at these photographs in that depressed autumn, I felt as though I were seeing some of them for the first time. Having recently faded so far from the world around me that I thought myself unrecognizable, I seemed to discover in them a means to verify my own existence. Here, at least, I thought, I have been really present. I imagined that if I could reconstruct those fleeting moments of proven being before the camera, I might be able to work out why I had now apparently evanesced to the point where, on being photographed, I barely credited that I would register on film. This was not an entirely fanciful notion: snapshots from this time show me as an emaciated wraith, and I recall very clearly my feeling that each time there was a little less of me to photograph.
¶ Reliquary
I had never seen most of these photographs of my parents until they were both dead. What I was looking at as I stared at them alone in my room was a world that, for me, had only come into existence with the disappearance of the figures at its centre. At least, this is how I remember it: that the images of them I found in their room after my father’s death allowed me to picture for the first time what they looked like and the world they inhabited. Can this be true? Did they really never present me with the evidence of their lives prior to my own? Was there never an evening when, together, we passed around the mostly black and white images, my father ruefully noting his full head of hair, my mother recalling school-friends and flatmates? It seems an eccentric lapse: to behave as if our family had no visual history worth sharing. Not for the first time, I compared my own photographic inheritance unfavourably with the means I imagined other families employing to protect theirs: the photograph album’s material repository and the ritual (by which one comes to know the photograph as well as, if not better than, the moment captured there) of communal perusal.
The family photograph has not always been subject to the same curatorial regime. In the earliest days of the medium, the daguerreotype – a print whose solid metallic base held an image of such fragility that it only manifested itself at a specific attitude to the light, and might be erased if exposed too long – was kept in its own individual case. Many of these cases have, of course, survived: their varnished wooden exteriors and rich velvet insides attest to the reverence with which the faint image would once have been treated. The clearest evidence of their special status is to be glimpsed in mid-nineteenth-century photographs themselves, where whole families can sometimes be seen gathered around a daguerreotype of an absent or deceased relative. Often, the photographed picture is actually invisible. Still hidden in its miniature cabinet, it nevertheless accrues to itself a care and veneration which seems to be based as much on touch as on vision. Semi-orphaned siblings surround their remaining parent, who holds the tiny sliver of a lost spouse’s memory: the whole family reaches out to touch the frail relic. Mothers whose children have died in infancy cradle minute reminders of exhausted little bodies. Seeing the photograph is only one way of making it mean something: its presence is as resonant (perhaps even more so, if the image has started to fade) as its appearance.
For the Victorians, such reminders of the photograph’s tactility extended its significance, and, by means of an impressive variety of ancillary objects and appended matter, ensured that the physical spell of the picture spread around it like the shrine that threatens to overwhelm the relic of a saint. All manner of things were attached to the photograph. (We ought not to conclude that the picture simply needed its mnemonic power upgraded: image and object formed a circuit of reciprocal energies.) The scrap of hair, secreted in a locket alongside the photograph, is only the most obvious addition: this traditional memento might be further worked to form a decorative border to the photograph, or even woven to compose a consoling verse. A thriving domestic industry, overseen mostly by the women of a family, affixed poems, flowers both dried and artificial, fragments of clothing, certificates of birth or death, elaborately executed drawings or paintings in which the photographed figure might appear to perform in a pious or nostalgic tableau. In turn, the photograph could itself become an adjunct to a more solid piece of domestic furniture: sewn on to a cushion or inserted into a shrine to a deceased child. By such means, the humble image was made to live again according to the new chronology of remembrance, of which our modest photographic albums seem only to have understood the barest outlines. Still, they preserve an element of order and ritual which is quite foreign to my own experience of the photographs I own.
¶ Lumber room
The photographs I have managed to salvage from the house of my childhood – that is, those of them that I have not, over the years, lost, foolishly discarded or (even worse) given away – are subject to no visible principle of organization whatsoever. Protected but uncelebrated, they have sat (apart from that brief period when they became a nightly obsession) in a succession of more or less forgotten corners. Occasionally, I have taken one or two out and displayed them for a while. Looking back, I realize that I have only ever chosen those which seemed to have some vague artistic merit: the particularly striking composition of a photograph of my father on a Parisian street half a century ago (reminiscent of the work of Robert Doisneau, though more affecting because less sure of its own appeal to the romance of the city), or the fancied resemblance of a picture of my mother’s family in the 1930s to something seized on by August Sander: a study, say, in the taxonomy of rural respectability. Or I might simply have been drawn by an image that seemed to accord with an almost caricatured notion of what a ‘family photograph’ ought to look like: awkward and poetic, luminously ordinary. I invested some energy in these decisions, but risked no reflection that could be said to have properly reckoned with their real meaning for me. Then, for that short, and wretched, period in my late twenties, certain photographs of my parents became, as I lingered over them, allegorical images of my own sorry state of mind. Still, I could do little more than stare stupidly at them in turn, summoning no sense of connection (or even of debilitating distance) that might turn itself into a narrative or a nexus of emotion or memory. In short: still no meaning. (I thought that ‘meaning’ was what I was after.)
It has never occurred to me to find them a more satisfactory home than the tattered box file where they currently reside. My reluctance to dignify them with the sense of a collection by putting them in an album stems, I suppose, from my furtive, shameful relationship with them: from some sense that I’d have both to face up to them and let them go if I gave them a more permanent arrangement. I marvel at those who can pull out a volume of family snapshots and see there a continuity that I find unfathomable. How can one look at these things and not feel that they are spinning in some chaotic parallel universe into which one might be sucked at any moment? What unimaginable reckoning has taken place that allows a person to act as if at home with the archive of lost time? In the face of my own small gathering, I either want to flee as far from them as possible, or am rooted to the spot for hours. And if I have recently, at last, found a middle ground between those two impulses, it may be only because I have forced myself (and here is the evidence) to attempt a minimal description of what these images of my parents look like. For that is, I suspect, what I had never really considered: these photographs’ status as mere records, of something, of somebody, that I have done my best to disguise by a blithe or morose gaze which never properly saw them in the first place.
The photographs in my collection have been in my sole possession for almost a decade and a half. For some reason, I cannot look at them without noting this fact, which means that soon I will have had them for as long as my parents
were married. The calculation is meaningless, but reminds me that I think of them as engaged together on a round-about journey. For the most verifiably ancient – a pair of photographs that show, separately, my mother and father, and that were probably taken within a year or two of each other – the time spent as part of my collection will have been only a brief interlude in their history. Before that, they may well have been hidden away in albums belonging to my parents’ respective families, oblivious to the secret affinity that would one day bring them together. They might have been displayed, on top of a pair of brooding, crudely veneered cabinets, in rooms reserved for especially respectable visitors and sober or celebratory occasions. I imagine them looking down, these two pictures (whose faces we will meet before long), on christening parties and funerals, visiting priests and departing emigrants. Or perhaps (because in their different ways they record moments that are intimate as well as public) they will have been tucked at parental bedsides or hung in more frequented living rooms. They may not have been treated with the respect due a photograph taken by a professional at all, but considered as mementoes to be regularly regarded: reminders, in fact, of love.
Later photographs inherited from my parents divide more readily into those that might once have graced a sideboard or been hung on a parlour wall and those (too banal, too informal, or simply too obviously part of an explosion in the sheer quantity of photographs taken) that probably emerged only rarely from an envelope, an album, or a shoebox. Looking at them now, I wonder how my parents chose to bring these photographs and not others with them when they set up home together. Of course, they may have been taken from their respective homes later (maybe much later: photographs, after all, change hands most often when somebody dies). Even established in their new home (my home), they would never have been seen like this, together. They would have stayed in the separate drawers of my parents’ dressing table, in different boxes and suitcases shoved under the middle of their bed, in crumbling brown envelopes at the back of the wardrobe. They ended up, in other words, in all the places where my brothers and I later found them.
My parents could not be said to have been keen photographers. They photographed only our annual family holidays and, at other times of the year, the most important occasions: First Communions, confirmations, the visits of emigrant family members. But even as I write this, my certainty slips away again. There are enough photographs of me extant to suggest that the camera came out, sometimes, for a spontaneous snapshot or two. And I recall also a few stray images of myself that are now definitively lost: standing in the front garden, dressed in a Scout’s uniform and dreading (justifiably, as it turned out) the boisterous, pointless rigours of an annual camping trip; the whole family gathered beneath the blossoms of my grandfather’s apple trees; a selection of holiday snaps in which I squint against the sun and try my best to imagine myself elsewhere.
Perhaps my sense of the paucity of photographs in our household derives instead from the fact that, once developed and deposited, still in their envelopes, in my parents’ bedroom, they were so rarely brought out. Or maybe it comes from the perennially disappointing appearance of the images themselves. My parents seem always to have chosen the most unattractive sort of print: the texture of so many of these images is weirdly striated, knurled, thickened by a patina that can sometimes obscure all detail. I remember my surprise, on examining the occasional snapshot given to us by relatives, that a photograph could be so much clearer and more luminous. You would think, sifting through a decade and a half of our photographed history, that a thick membrane had grown between ourselves and the world: everything is slightly out of focus, trapped behind a veil that persists till the very last photograph of my parents together, taken just weeks before my mother died. In the end, though, the odd obscurity of our family photographs has nothing to do with the quality of the actual prints, but is traceable to this clear and wrenching memory: that long before this final snapshot appeared, we had stopped taking pictures.
In the winter I spent emerging from the worst of my depression, as I sat and looked at these photographs from my childhood, I was struck by how much more lucid were the monochrome photos of my parents dating from before my birth. They were not only sharper, but more various, more relaxed, more obviously celebratory. Our family photographs, by contrast, invariably capture static poses: they show us behaving as if the presence of the camera were a command rather than an invitation. In the throes of my depression, I was unsurprised to find that we rarely managed to smile (though I suspect, with a less fogged eye, that our solemn expressions were usually the result of a mistimed exposure rather than collective misery). I realized that I knew very little of my parents’ lives before my birth, and next to nothing about the years immediately prior to their marriage in 1968. The photographs were unlikely to fill the gaps in my knowledge, but I was sure that if I concentrated hard enough on them, something would come to light. The later images in which I appeared, after all, had yielded, after long gazing beneath the weak ellipse of light above my desk, numerous tiny forgotten details of my childhood. Glimpsed through a window: a white plastic flowerpot which sat there, its contents long dead, until the day I left the house. Seen flourishing above my infant head in our garden: a lilac tree that had stopped flowering by the time I quit the garden for the last time. I became similarly obsessed with the specifics of the earlier photographs. In my doleful state, I thought I might find in the photographs of my parents some means of reconstituting what I remembered of them, and what I had never known.
¶ Fragment
Photographs of my mother make up only a small fraction of the collection before me, but the full span of her life is represented, with only two notable breaks in the continuum. The first corresponds, I think, with my mother’s leaving home and moving to Dublin. Suddenly, it seems, it’s the sixties, and she has cut and styled her hair into a soft bouffant which is still there, somewhat stiffened, in the last photograph for which she sat. (This final picture also marks the end of the second gap in my mother’s photographic history.) The first breach is notable too for an abrupt switch from black and white to colour. She becomes, in the muted decor of several sixties interiors – her sixties are not the garish years of nostalgic cliché, just as my photographed seventies are not yet the lurid decade of kitsch remembrance – recognizably the person I recall, posing (always a touch more elegant than those around her) with friends and flatmates in comfortably dull sitting rooms.
But first: here is a tiny image obviously torn from an album. A map-like portion of black paper has come away with the photograph. Where the decoratively serrated edge has been torn, and the picture begun to lift from its backing, it is clear that the print itself is extremely fragile, much thinner than those which come before or after it. This picture also stands out as the only photograph in the whole collection to be tinted, very slightly, with a faint sepia tone. I have always assumed that it was taken by a professional: it is one of several showing my mother and her siblings, each image posed in almost the same arrangement (my mother and her two brothers standing or sitting in a line, the younger girls coaxed in front of them one by one over the course of a decade or so). The photographer has been rather careless with his lighting: the photograph is over-exposed, and the four children pictured here (the two youngest of my mother’s sisters, I assume, are not yet born) as they sit beneath a pale, blurred hedge are squinting as they smile towards the camera. My mother is not quite ‘herself’ yet; she grimaces, barely recognizable, out of the centre of the shot, flanked by two mischievous-looking brothers and her toddler sister. The date, I calculate, is about 1940.
Almost all of these pictures of my mother – from the black and white forties to the colour sixties – make perfect sense to me. Their dates may be vague, but their locations are easily read. Even when, as later in the photographs of my mother in Dublin, a series of unknown faces starts to intrude, I still have the sense that I know who or what I’m looking at: a discernible family history unfolds here. C
ertain details recall what I know. My mother’s father kept greyhounds; here is one of them, straining at a leash held tightly by my young uncle. The youngest of my aunts has been very ill: here she is looking slight for her age at the front of the sibling group; my mother tugs her pigtails and laughs.
My mother moves recognizably across these photographs, slowly becoming the image of her that I remember. The photographs of my father, by contrast, are often unfathomable. There is little sense of a family here at all: no record of his parents or two sisters, no evidence of a life together. Only a single, formal, photograph of my father hints at a family group, waiting, just beyond the frame, for him to compose himself for a studio photographer. He seems to have been thrust into the world without ritual or celebration, without regular photographic gatherings of the sort which ensure that the photographs of my mother are so easily legible. Here he is, a teenaged blur, apparently quickening his pace to escape the viewfinder of a photographer on a Dublin street (its width, behind him, suggests that it might be O’Connell Street). Though the image is hazy and has faded badly, his fixed stare, straight ahead, is still recognizable. Beside him, less distinct, is another young man, who hangs back slightly behind his friend, but looks directly at the camera.
Behind them, two girls, arm in arm, also address the camera openly; their coats are tightly buttoned, their heads covered with scarves. Are they together,
these four? It is impossible to say – the two young women certainly seem to think that they’re part of the photographer’s composition. Only my father looks uncomfortable, even irritated, at being photographed. He seems to have deliberately ignored the photographer who has just stepped into the middle of the pavement, and who will presumably, in a moment, offer a snapshot of this hurrying foursome. If the photographer has any sense, he will ignore the rather haughty youth at the centre of his frame and concentrate his efforts on his slouching companion and the eager duo behind. But it seems he may have succeeded in persuading my father to part with his name, address and cash. The fleeting moment on the street has ended up as an image of my father that I cannot parse: it tells me nothing and connects to no image I already possess of him.