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