The final image : starting to think about Assignment 5

The beginning...

Over the past few months I have been thinking about a possible subject for this last assignment.

My mother in law was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s recently and this brought back memories of my own personal experience of coping with my mother’s senile dementia. I remember her looking at a collection of photographs that I had brought together to help trigger her memories of family times past. Studying a picture of my father taken before he died twenty years earlier, she commented that she hardly remembered him and what he looked like. But she did recognise him.

I also remembered at the time, colleagues who used to conduct reminiscence sessions for elderly people in care homes telling me how the sense of smell triggered memories much longer than visual impressions. Had we had more time together I would have brought together an ‘album’ of scents and smells to trigger our conversations of things past.

All of which brings me to the matter in hand, the personal project for Assignment five.

My father died nearly thirty years ago very suddenly and we were left with our own personal memories and the shared photographic memory captured in family photo albums. More recently  have been researching my family history, I realised that there was very little trace of my father 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 father.

Is it possible to ‘conjure’ up memories of my Dad through photographic images that trigger more than a visual memory? How to conjure up the memory of someone not there? There are a number of issues, for example:

-         Finding traces left behind that could be used for this project i.e. physical evidence of having made an impact

-         Using places / people/ objects that trigger personal memories that have no meaning to an outsider

-         Achieving images that give a ‘sense’ of a person to those who never knew them

Project brief

A collection of 10-12 images on a personal theme drawn from my interest in family history.

Aim

To explore the concept of memory via photography and my interest in family history.

Outcome

A collection of images that give a sense of who my Dad was …Ideally photographs that also create a visual ‘memory’ that can be experienced by ‘outsiders’ and maybe trigger other   family memories of their own though this perhaps is more a challenge .

Concepts to be explored / represented

-         Memory - here and now or referenced by old photographs?

- Shadow on the wall effect

-         Family – father  ( died in 1922 –no extant photograph but sibling- step sister still alive )

-          Workplace – greengrocer/ nursery man/ gardener

-   E.g.  There is a black and white photo of my Dad taken in a greengrocer’s shop which could be revisited by taking the same kind of image today using a willing greengrocer in same pose

-   Smell of hot sun in greenhouses full or ripening tomatoes

-   Autumn colour of chrysanthemums ( Dad grew these commercially as well as tomatoes)

-          Wartime  - RAF / Army ( Burma ) –memorabilia

-          Character – artistic / creative/ introspective

-   The artist using acrylics/ sketching trips /

-          My childhood memories – cigar smoke, Satsumas , pomegranates at Christmas

-          Sense of place - where does he fit in?

-  Referencing his father

Images

The plan is to use colour or monochrome as appropriate to the intended outcome. The images are likely to be a mix of representational/ still life/ interpretative / photo journalistic again dependent on the best way to achieve a particular interpretation.

Working title: In the footsteps of Dad…..

Project timescale

January – April 2014

Submission date: 25 April 2014