Family Photos III

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family Photos II

A poem is an act of memory. Poetry was first forged out of the need to remember what would otherwise be forgotten in an oral tradition record-keeping is an art, not an act of administration.... (Jeanette Winterson)

A photo is an act of memory - forged from the need to remember I was there, they were there, we looked like this...
Does taking the photo or looking at it complete/define the act of memory?  Renewing youth to the old,  giving life to the deceased, fixing form and faces to the oral traditions of our families.

I hold the photo in my hand and I am aware it is an object - it has passed through other hands than mine, yet it has ended here with stories untold by the image frozen on its surface.  There is no sound, no flesh, no more than what is held inside the frame.  A single moment caught  permanently - held on the brittle paper that smells of dust and old houses.

But the doors of memory it opens go on and on, to real and unreal memories, stories told and forgotten and made up completely.

The past is always carried into the present by small things.  So a lily is bent with the weight of its permanence.
-Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero 

my great-grandparents and their first five children

 

 

vacation in California

 

my grandmother and an unknown suitor

my father's uncle Charlie, dead at 23 from tuberculosis

a child's scribbles on a picture of my father and his grandfather

 

soldier's portrait of my father's uncle

with a French girl during the war

 

Three Periods of Memory

I think it is funny, no hope you do too.  Not being sadistic but feeling this way and remembering the Freudian slip of the century.

(the worst part is I was bribed at all to take this outrageous picture)

There Are Three Periods of Memory
By Anna Akhmatova
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

There are three periods of memory.
The first of them is like a yesterday,
The soul basks in the blessings of their vault,
The body takes its glory in their shade.
Laughter has not yet passed away, tears gush,
The blot is not yet bleached out of the desk,
The kiss, like a heart's seal, is terminal,
Is singular and unforgettable...
But this does not last long before the vault
Has vanished overhead. And in some backwoods
Neighborhood, in a solitary house
Where summers leave the winters' chill warmed over,
Where spiders weave, where all things are in dust,
Where lovestruck letters lead a crumbling half-life,
Sly portraits change into their different selves
Where people go as if to their own grave,
Soaping their fingers pure as they go back
Wiping a fleeting fear out like a sty
From laden eyes, breathing a burdened sigh...
But time, the clock, is ticking and one spring
Yields to another as the skies are flushed,
The cities roll through names, and none remain
As witnesses to what exactly happened.
Gone are the folk we'd weep or reminisce with.
And slowly then the shades go off from us,
Shades we no longer care to summon back,
Whose reemergence would be terrible.
And once we wake we note how we've forgotten
The path back to that solitary house
And, gasping from the anger and the shame,
We bolt there but (as usual in dreams)
It has all changed: the folk, the walls, the things,
And no one knows us there where we are foreign.
A wrong turn took us elsewhere. God almighty!
We come to the most caustic thought of all:
We come to know that we could never fit
The past into the margins of this life,
A past almost as alien to us
As to the folk next door, we do not know
The dear departed from a stranger, people
That God saw fit to separate from us
Did fine without us. Now we even know
That all is for the best....

 

Père Lachaise

Going through hard drives, organizing archives, finding forgotten pictures.
A few years ago, I started walking through the cemetery about once a week with a camera - I was suffering the photographer's equivalent of writer's block. 
The image making process quickly became a form of walking meditation as I watched the four seasons come and go, the life of the trees, the tourists, the caretakers, surrounded by the remembrances of beings who once lived.

Momento mori,
                  et in Arcadia ego,
                             ashes to ashes and dust to dust

and all that.  Do I hear the whispers of the past in my images, or are they only a documentation of our death rituals, our need to create a city for the dead?
Re-looking at my pictures, I do not know what they mean to me, but the cemetery gates are calling.  They are only a five minutes walk from where I live.