Over the winter holidays, looking for something else at my in-laws, I came across my father-in-law’s Kodak Retina from the early 1950’s. As someone who went to college, studied photography, and made it their career for a long time, I had to see if it worked. I bought some film and ran it through the camera, and it does. It’s a 35mm, fully manual camera. By that I mean you have to pay attention to taking a photograph, it’s not point and shoot in any manner or form. Ideally you want a light meter to tell you what settings to use for shutter speed and aperture, and a tape measure to measure the distance between camera and subject. All of these settings (aperture, shutter speed, and focus) need to be done manually on a few dials. Fortunately, having grown up in the age of film, I wasn’t too bad at the exposure, but found I either completely forgot to focus, or that I need to work on figuring out distance-by-eye!
Old car found on brother-in-laws property. Forgot to focus!
As I looked over the blur, the grain, the light in these photographs of family members, I wondered at how my wife’s siblings had changed since the camera first recorded them, playing as kids, going on holiday, and at school events. All those moments in lived stories which had shone through a lens onto a bit of film base covered in a gelatin emulsion.
There are some cultures where having your photograph taken was seen as taking a piece of your soul away. (I look at famous people these days, and wonder if that’s actually true!) These moments that are captured and saved are moments of storytelling, fragments which can prompt memories. People can look at a photograph and something that they may have forgotten about suddenly floods back. Looking at family photograph albums we look at people. Some things we may remember and others we don’t. What stories happened to have such memories? What stories happened (or didn’t) that caused us to forget.
Me, a long time ago, on the way to Frigate Foudroyant when it was a summer camp.
We don’t make photograph albums anymore. Do we? Well, most people don’t - my mum still does! And so do I, but for me these are smaller albums of events, highlights, and are not the whole big picture of what was going on with notes and names always. My mum created a photo album for each of my kids. She collected photographs of them growing up, wrote next to the photos, and built the albums over the first sixteen years of their lives and then gave the albums to the kids on their sixteenth birthdays. They were both genuinely bowled over by this. For when they were too young to remember, the notes explain what was going on in the image, and where.
The stories we tell are made up of fragments which we piece together. What pieces do you have that you’ve pieced together? What stories do they tell? Do you see things clearly, smell the smells, hear the sounds? Reclaim these stories of your past and share them with other family members.
Happy New Year,
Simon
January, 2024