Traces of my Dad - a reflective account

Traces of my Dad – a reflective account

‘The memory is never entirely lost and family snapshots are a means of recalling buried past traces ‘ enlighteningthoughts (1)

Researching my family history last year, I realised that there was very little trace of my Dad other than a few black and white images from the early days of his marriage and fading colour ‘snaps’ taken over the years to record family events rather than my Dad.

This gave me the idea and title for this project, ‘Traces of my Dad’.

Is it possible to ‘conjure’ up memories of my Dad through photographic images taken now that trigger a visual memory or maybe more- a sense of smell perhaps? Could I conjure up the memory of someone not there? Would this memory just work for me or conjure up a sense of who my Dad was for someone who did not know him?

‘The photograph is a prop, a pre-text: it sets the scene for recollection ‘Annette Kuhn (2)

I chose a number of themes: Dad’s workplace, his wartime experiences, his character as expressed by hobbies and my childhood memories. Whether I used colour or monochrome would be determined by the intended outcome. And I imagined that the images would likely be a mix of representational/ still life/ interpretative / photo journalistic - again dependent on the best way to achieve a particular interpretation.

Not surprisingly, I discovered early on that the images I had in my mind did not always translate into a feasible image or in reality turned out to labour a point too much. For example, I had in mind to capture a shadow which would give the sense of my Dad just being out of picture or glimpsed as a shadowy form- such as a shadow of bike and rider. The position of the sun and location worked against this. When I eventually achieved a shadow of a bicycle- it just did not say anything. 

With no images of my Dad’s family before the war, I wondered if a good family history starting point might be his father, Henry Gordon Greenfield. Dad never knew his father who was away at war when he was born and died in Ireland in 1919. 

P700

Just before Christmas I accidently found out 

from my elderly aunt that my grandfather 

was buried locally in Worthing cemetery.  

Would this provide any photographic reference?

I managed to find the gravestone, erected 

by the War Graves Commission, and a passing chance encounter with a stranger in the cemetery provided 

more information on my grandfather.

A plus factor for family history but not for my project though. The visual image of the grave did not say,

as they say, ‘speak’ to me. 

I also had the idea to convey the passage of time by through images in a rough chronological order reinforced by the colour of the final image e.g.  a 1950s image being black and white, a 1960s image being faded Kodak colour etc. . Experimentation here made me think that applying this consistently across all images resulted in a contrived feel which did not always benefit or enhance the actual images.

And how about using colour to represent smell or heat etc.? I was thinking here of a hot, sunny greenhouse being a faded amber colour. Again when I tried this the resulting version did not create the ‘feel of summer heat ’that I was looking for and so ended on the pile of rejections.

Roland Barthes  talks of objects being ‘accepted inducers of associations of ideas ( a bookcase indicates an intellectual)‘  (3)and I considered this when composing still life scenes for the project, e.g. the juxta position of cigar and tangerine indicating Christmas. He says, ‘Thanks to its code of connotation the reading of the photograph is always historical; it depends on the reader’s ‘knowledge’ just as though it were a matter of a real language, intelligible only if one has learned the signs’ (3). This of course, presented me with a potential problem if my audience is much younger than me.

This brings me then to the question of captions. I decided to go ahead and produce a photobook to present my project. As advice on the OCA website suggested, photobooks are not as straightforward as one might think. Not least in respect of captions. Advice says keep the caption simple, so this is exactly what I did, trying where practicable to hint at what the image represented to me. With hindsight, I think the need that I felt to explain images suggests a lack of success in what I was trying to achieve.

What worked well? Some images worked really well from the point of view of composition and processing the image, such as the cigar and tangerine or the chrysanthemum - others less so e.g. the lemons and pumice stone. I was able to use a number of techniques learnt earlier in the course during the processing of  images. If I am honest, I probably spent too much time adjusting the colour of images in a search to achieve the level of interpretation I wanted drawn from the colours chosen.

I was glad that I had decide on the subject of this project last year as this gave me the opportunity to investigate locations and possible images in a practical way. I was able to photograph ripening tomatoes and flowering chrysanthemums in the right season.

I did move away from the initial brief en route in that some of the themes did not work sufficiently well so I abandoned them e.g. the idea of shadows and a room or scene just left. Problems with the lighting of some still life subjects were solved using a ‘soft box’.

I am happy with the end product regarding the images. They are not perfect and I look forward to a critique here to help me move on.

I am less happy regarding the photobook itself.I noticed an error after the work had been sent off that I could have avoided i.e. a slight cropping of the cigar image from the left side. ‘Proof reading’ images is tricky, like proof reading text, you see what you want to see sometimes. I am also not sure whether the choice of a highly glossy finish was such a good idea. Perhaps a more matt finish might have worked better. I would certainly welcome advice as to how this project could have been improved and better presented in photobook form; whether an explanatory introduction is advisable and whether I should have used more explanatory captions. 

Lastly, the aim of this project was to explore the concept of memory via photography and my interest in family history.I believe this was achieved. I know from my reading around the subject of memory and photography that I have only touched the tip of an iceberg and I will want to go further into the subject.

‘ memories evoked by a photo do not simply spring out of the image itself, but are generated in an intertext of discourses that shift between past and present, spectator and image, and between all these cultural contexts, historical moments. In all of this, the image figures largely as a trace, a clue: necessary, but not sufficient, to the activity of meaning-making; always signalling somewhere else. Annette Kuhn (4) 

My intended outcome was a collection of images which give a sense of my Dad – images on a personal theme drawn from my interest in family history. Whether these photographs will create a visual ‘memory’ that others experience and whether other people’s family memories are triggered, I have yet to discover.

Footnotes

1. enlighteningthoughts. The Memory Box (video reconstruction), http://goo.gl/IL08HD   enlighteningthoughts.wordpress.com

2. Kuhn, Annette. ‘Remembrance’, p18 in Family Snaps. The Meanings of Domestic       Photography, edited by Jo Spence & Patricia Holland. Virago 1991

3. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Fontana 1977

4. Kuhn, Annette. ‘Remembrance’, p18 in Family Snaps. The Meanings of Domestic   Photography, edited by Jo Spence & Patricia Holland. Virago 1991