![]() ![]() He also had a cine camera, and I sometimes feel guilty that my own children, unlike me, have no moving images of themselves to look back on. My father’s childhood was heavily documented by comparison, and he was scrupulous about documenting his children’s, first in tiny black-and-white prints, then with colour transparencies, which were looked at through a viewfinder or (at the annual Christmas slide show put on for my long-suffering cousins) on a white screen. I felt shut out from her past, and the lack of pictures was part of the reason. There were none of her large family, either. The earliest image I had of her till then was a graduation photo, taken in Dublin. My favourite photo is one of my mother in pigtails as a child, an image unknown to me until a few years ago, after her death, when a cousin sent it. Worse, though, would be to have none at all. Larkin has a poem about how memories “link us to our losses” by showing us “what we have as it once was,/Blindingly undiminished, just as though/By acting differently we could have kept it so.” That’s the effect old photos have on me. But those photographic images are a source of sorrow, whereas the images in my head are not. It’s sentimental, I know: time passes the moment goes even as the shutter clicks. But a few were trick photos, such as the one with my mother, sister and me arranged above each other on a steep hill, to look like acrobats standing on each other’s shoulders.ĭespite their playfulness, my chief feeling when I look at those photos is sadness: that most of the people in them are now dead that the times they commemorate can’t be retrieved. Most of his snaps were taken without us noticing. But he wasn’t absent, merely hiding behind the lens of his Nikon. A stranger looking through my childhood photos might deduce a) that we were perpetually on holiday in north Wales, and b) that my father never accompanied us. Cameras were more demanding then, and I hadn’t the patience. I tell myself I’ve never owned a camera, but that doesn’t square with a memory of being given one as a birthday present in my teens, and of a losing struggle with light, shade, aperture, distance, angle, focus. Blake Morrison aged eight on a beach in Wales ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |