Peeling back the layers

the story of a photograph

I’m not very good at keeping or collating photos. Like just about everyone else these days, I share photos of my life and of the lives of those close to me on social media. I probably overshare. But, give me a box of old family photos and, the minute I can’t identify people in them, I want to distance myself. Pretend the photos don’t exist. Aren’t my responsibility.

Some of that is shame: obviously I didn’t listen to my mum carefully enough when she was telling me names, relationships, connections. The photos of groups of unknown grumpy, frumpy looking folk from a long time back, in some location I can’t pinpoint, did not resonate enough for me to take proper care or note of their existence when Mum explained the whys and wherefores. Perhaps I was too interested in the now - in my own sweet existence - to trouble myself too much with people who seemed insubstantial, ethereal. Perhaps it’s just hard to cling to the threads of people you’ve never met. And, to cap it all, those grainy sepia people from days gone by so often stare right into the camera lens as if to reproach you for your lack of interest or knowledge.

Thinking practically, what do you do with all the photos curling loose in drawers, slip-sliding in albums, crumpled in bin bags? How do you even begin to collate them when you don’t even know who took them, when or where they were taken and who the people are? Even if you carefully digitise them, will anyone actually ever look at them again anyway?

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that other people enjoy working out the whys, hows, whos and whens of old photos. It seems to be an unwritten law that each family has one dedicated archivist within it, teasing out family history and preserving it. In my family it’s my cousin’s wife, originally from New Zealand and now an Australian. She’s a lawyer by profession and must have the patience of a saint to pick loose the knots of family ties. In The Husband’s family, it was Uncle Tim. A project now inherited by another relative.

And, the weird thing is, I love it when someone else does all the work and keeps the records. Here in Berwick in North Northumberland,

Cameron Robertson

is working his way through archives of photos - you have to read his substack to understand the colossal task he has shouldered and seems to relish. The results of his labour are compelling in terms of stories, history, surprise connections, humanity.

I’ve always been enchanted by the idea that a poem might be considered ‘a moment’s monument’ and I guess the same is true of a photograph. Although somehow it can be easier to define meanings in a poem - or explore them - because, although tangible in themselves, words are also intangibly multifaceted. Of course, some photography is styled that way too. But a snapshot of an ordinary group of people? Not so much.

A random group of people. As it happens, they are my grandma and grandad on the left. No idea why or where it was snapped. Chap on the right? No idea. On the back, I've written Harry & Lena Cook. 1954. How did I know it was 1954? There must have been a clue that gave me the information, but that is now lost too. Another mystery that I probably won't solve.

Last week, I was with my family on the Black Isle in Ross & Cromarty. A family holiday. Like so many we’ve spent together. And yet also very different. Over the years we’ve recorded such holidays through postcards, snapshots and in videos set to music.

A photo taken during this week was what made me think about the layers of a photograph. Not just the memory of the moment, or the photographer, place and people captured. But the thought process, the emotions, the undercurrents, the intentions and nuances of intimacy and separation. Here it is.

It’s my daughters and I taking a quick swim in chilly Loch Achilty near Strathconon. We’re pleased with ourselves for finding the spot by accident, having taken a slightly wrong turn on the way back to our holiday rental home. What a treat on an unexpected balmy September evening in the Highlands of Scotland! We’re also aware that the other half of our family are not with us because they went to the supermarket when we hopped in our vehicles and went our separate ways. So, we’re feeling a bit cheeky, a bit guilty.

The Husband (who took the photo) is chuffed to see me in the water with my girls. He knows it means a lot to me. To be with them. To be in the chill water I love, after a long abstinence because of health stuff. We feel good to be ‘cleansed’ after a day’s work in the wood that my older brother (in the supermarket!) and I inherited when our eldest brother, Stephen, died unexpectedly earlier this year.

But, do you know what caught me most when I glanced at the photo in the family WhatsApp group? The colours. The shimmer of autumnal light across the trees and water. It seemed to capture all the slippery transcience of time. Weirdly, it also echoed the light in the picture on the side of the scatter tube containing my late brother’s ashes which, strapped in the boot of our car, was accompanying us on every excursion.

In the next couple of days, once we’d cleared as many of the plastic tree sleeves from Stephen’s wood as we could, we planned to hold a family gathering in the wood, to celebrate him and leave him in a place he had, at times, a complicated relationship with, but that he loved.

Will I keep that photo in a special place? I doubt it. Will it continue to resonate with me? Honestly, I don’t know. What I do know is that, in that moment of seeing the photo and, even as I write about it now, I felt - feel - loss, longing and completion way beyond that simple and slightly blurry snapshot. Way beyond a single moment.

But that will not transform my relationship with the semi-sorted old photos piled in the corner of my living room. They’ll still sit there gathering dust, until I get the urge to flick through some of them to find something - like the snap of my grandparents above.

The simple fact is, that no one in the future will stumble across that photo of me and my daughters swimming and experience the intimate emotions I’ve tried to describe here. And that’s as it should be.

Uncovering and sharing stories - true and fictional - is a mysterious and individual alchemy. A fundamental element of being human. And, sometimes, a photo - as well as being a known or unknown memory - is an extraordinary catalyst.

Stephen's wood on the Black Isle.

Till next time

Campfire, marshmallows and a wee dram. Celebrating Stephen.