Colouring the passage of time ..

I've been trying to work out how to give my project some coherence , a thematic approach that brings everything together other than the subject of the project i.e.my Dad. This has proved harder than trying to source objects for a still life approach to some of my ideas...I had to resort to Amazon to track down a genuine pumice stone ( more of that later ).

It did occur to me that I could use colour to indicate the passage of time in my approach ..i.e. images looking back to my father's middle age or his wartime experiences looking like photos taken at that time whether in mint condition as taken or looking as if the passage of time had had an effect on the actual photo..
But would this sacrifice the overall quality of image?

In her book 'On Photography', Susan Sontag wrote that a photograph is 'not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask' (“Image-World” p154). How to achieve the 'trace' of my Dad that I'm looking for ?

 My father  was a nurseryman at the beginning of his working life growing tomatoes and at the end when he grew carnations and chrysanthemums. In between he worked as a shop assistant in a greengrocer's..


So, what does the nursery offer?




P651 original: F10 @ 1/60 18mm ISO AWB  

P651b Cropped 

I have very dim memories of visiting my Dad's tomato greenhouses when very young, maybe a toddler. I remember heat, the smell of tomatoes on the vine and a brick built well and being stung by red ants. P651b comes closest to conjuring up the sense of warmth I felt then. The colouring has a warmth to it; a sense of sunshine and warm brick.The watering can waits for someone to return..or for a hosepipe to be attached. Either way the image has the promise...and joins my shortlist to be revisited...



P651c 

I

P651d

Both P651c and P651d above convey time passing in the sense of a decaying photographic colour print - this could be an image taken some time ago before digital photography - a fading instamatic print.

P651e

This sepia coloured image (P651e ) above suggests a Victorian / Edwardian nursery - too much is out of my time frame if I opt for a historical reality.

P651f

I think what this exercise has done is question my idea of using the colour of the images to indicate a linear passage of time through these recreated images /traces of Dad from crude black and white to digitally enhanced colour. I think this will create too much of a straitjacket where I want the flexibility to create a memory or trace or footprint using both composition and processing to best effect to achieve the end result that I'm looking for.

What does a string of tomatoes say ? Roland Barthes and testing concepts

There a number of concepts that I want to test out as part of gathering material for this final project. For example, whether to use objects with a direct connection to my Dad such as medals, army service record book or to opt for objects, subjects, scenes with no direct link but a visual connection via my memory or imagination.

There is also the concept of time passing or time past; the sense of smell or feeling. Do I or can I convey this by using different software processes or camera settings.

And how to bring a sense of wholeness to the images that I choose for the final selection. Am I telling a story of conveying a sense of what a person was like. Will I need to explain the photos by way of actions or  allow the viewer to 'read' the image for themselves? 

Roland Barthes has some interesting things to say here in his work ' Image, Music, Text ' ( Fontana 1977 ). In chapter one entitled 'The Photographic Message', he writes 'Thanks to its code of connotation the reading of the photograph is thus 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'. He also says that meaning in images comes from the object photographed, 'the interest lies in the fact that objects are accepted inducers of associations of ideas'. A bookcase equals an intellectual etc.

So if I photograph an artist's easel, does this indicate that Dad was an artist ? If I select a picture of tomatoes, does that say he liked tomatoes, grows tomatoes?  

P644

And if I change the colour of the image, what does this transmit to the reader, particularly if they do not have the same  visual experience as myself? Does this matter if I'm creating visual memories rather than recreating them ?