Contemplating the Family Photo Album
All those photographs. What do you do with them all? Digital or analogue photo albums can be a remarkable starting point for a conversation of a shared human history.
From left: Kimmy, Tanya & Dolly in the back garden, circa 1972
Memories can be slippery devils. They swim around my brain, waiting for a moment of capture, the moment when I need to reel one into my conscious mind to muse over.
I've often wondered if my slightly obsessive picture-taking is related to my inability to remember experiences that should be significant. My husband remembers moments that I can't bring to mind at all. Sometimes this causes me an anxious spiral into unhelpful thoughts that ruminate on my possible failing brain and, therefore, failing health. Fortunately, this is not the case at all. My brain is working as it should be. I just happen to remember moments differently.
And yet I am not alone in this moment-by-moment visual documentation of our lives which has been gaining momentum over time, from Kodak's Box Brownie: you press the button, we do the rest, to an ever-increasing mass of images that now populate our digital realm.
I've often thought about collections of photographs in terms of a galaxy of stars. In my mind, it's a far more beautiful place than the constant sticky scroll of Instagram.
I find a word.
'desiderate: to yearn for something now lost.
At the heart of 'desiderate' is the Latin sidus, 'constellation', suggesting a sense of gazing at the stars in longing and hope.'
p.77 An Emotional Dictionary by Susie Dent
Familiar Pictures
A few years ago, I volunteered at The Keep, the public archive for Brighton & East Sussex, UK. Viewed from the curving road of the A27, the building houses climatically controlled storage for artefacts of local and historical information in the form of newspapers, various documents, audio recordings, and of course, photographs.
My first job involved scanning a collection of glass plate negatives from the early 1900s. In a small team of two, we cleaned and scanned several boxes of images from someone else's family history. The silver emulsion shimmered in the light, an impossibly thin layer on glass, each one measuring 2" x 3". The collection, donated by the family of a solicitor who lived in Hastings, revealed a delightful archive of familiar scenes: landscapes, houses, a garden, family groups, new babies in cots, portraits and a pet rabbit arranged carefully on a small wicker stool. My colleague referred to the photographs as describing the human condition.
"The concept of the human condition refers to the shared experiences, emotions, and challenges common to all human beings, regardless of culture, race, or background. It encompasses both the positive and negative aspects of human existence, including joy, love, and fulfilment, as well as, suffering, pain, and mortality."
You Press the Button, We Do the rest
In the depths of a cupboard at home lurks a couple of boxes where I keep old cameras. One of my favourites is a Kodak Brownie Reflex 20 I bought in Paddy's market in Glasgow in the early 1990s. It cost me five pounds. Someone loved this camera and took enormous care of it. It still has its case and manual, a thin pamphlet with instructions like:
Load in the shade - never in bright, direct light.
and
The best outdoor colour snapshots are made in sunlight - Have the sun behind you.
I own a Leica from the 1940s and two medium format cameras from more recent decades that produce the most glorious negatives but it's the small collection of instamatic cameras I have where my heart really lies.
Kodak released its first model of the box Brownie camera in 1900 and continued to release updated versions well into the 1950s. My camera looks exactly like the one on this product page, which dates the model from 1959. Although taking photos had become significantly cheaper over time, the film and processing costs still prohibited many people from taking the thousands of images we're used to taking now with our smartphones. Not so long ago, a roll of 24 or 36 exposures could stay in a camera for months, coming out for such significant occasions as a birthday, Christmas or the birth of a new baby.
So what to do with all these pictures?
Inside the Family Photo Album
Growing up in my family I had access to two photo albums I loved to look through. The first one contained the pictures of my mum and dad's wedding, and then pictures of their growing family consisting of myself and my sisters. Each page is a sticky board with an acetate overlay, all pages are spiral-bound with an ornate gold embossed cover. Its glamorous cover always lured me in where I'd find pictures of my parents (so young!) in houses I don't remember and places where I do.
The second album has a far more functional, practical cover, plain green vinyl. The album is thicker than its predecessor but still follows a similar design of sticky board pages spiral-bound together. Its contents still filled me with wonder. Pages and pages of places, people and pets, of which there were many. My mum still has those albums, at least, I think she does. Those photos aren't coming out as they're stuck forever by the glue of decades ago.
We’re All Photographers Now
For me, the most wonderful thing about these earlier analogue photographs are their errors. I love their artlessness much like the drawings of a child, there is a charm and naivety that the very best photographers might try to copy. There was a time in the 1990s when many fashion photographers attempted to articulate the snapshot aesthetic in editorials using a bright, violent flash, a more spontaneous composition, cropping someone as if they were moving out of frame.
For the analogue photographer, you never knew what you were going to get until those pictures came back from the chemist or the lab. Did you leave the lens cap on by mistake for the duration of your holiday? Is your thumb in the way of the lens? Or did the flash not fire resulting in a picture of your friends enclosed in fuzzy, unfocused darkness?
I love all these errors in composition and technique. I find them both funny and heartwarming. They speak of a different time. You only have to scroll through Instagram to see what wonderful photographers we've all become. The curve for learning is so much steeper and faster. You can practise until the end of time without incurring the running costs of film and processing. The costs are still there but tied up with your chosen cloud storage and your phone payment plan.
And yet, with all of this technological change, the photographs we make remain the same as ones made over a hundred years ago; pictures of holidays, family gatherings, weddings, birthdays, landscapes, babies, cats, dogs, food and gardens, shopping and selfies. The difference is we've become more knowledgeable about how to present ourselves to the world. We can practise our smile (with teeth or without), we know our 'best side' (left or right) and how to stand without looking as if we're in a school photograph. We all know it's curated for the world we live in today. Maybe it’s always been so.
Sharing Joy and Pain
I think about all this photographic activity and wonder about its purpose. For most people, their photographs are a point of connection, particularly for those whose families and friends are scattered around the world. We can share our joys and struggles, bridge gaps in language and culture and tell a story of our lives that others can connect to. Our pictures can serve as a point of conversation. Or an argument. Or we can marvel collectively at the family resemblances over generations.
I find another word:
'stound: a momentary pang of emotion
Many of us have come across an old photograph that unexpectedly stirs our emotions. We may feel a stab of grief when we smell a remembered perfume, hear a certain musical refrain, or revisit a place of our youth...in a nineteenth-century glossary of North Country words, 'stound' is defined as 'the sensation or first impression of sudden pain, arising from a knock or blow' - in other words, the instant response of the body before the brain catches up.'
p.313 An Emotional Dictionary by Susie Dent
We might not get a smell, or a taste, or a sound from a photograph - a two-dimensional image can only do so much. We can only capture visually what's there before us in a thin sliver of time. Our memories have to do the rest.
I think photographs are a starting point for stories, not the end of a life lived. We can display single photographs in frames, contain a series of them in albums or share as many as we want online. Ultimately they are the beginning of something, the beginning of a story you might want to tell.
