“The photograph is a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination” Roland Barthes
“New researchers believe these unreal experiences provide a glimpse into the way our brains stitch together our perception of reality.” New Scientist 2-11-2016
“You do not have to imagine things; reality gives you all you need.” Andre Kertesz
“Our minds jump across time propelling us backwards.” Rachel Smith, OCA Tutor
With these thoughts and the example of Sophie Calle in mind I have put these images and commentary together. Ideally they would be printed in a photo book with text on the left hand page and the images on the right.
1.
My old school scarf is full of meaning for me. 134 was my number at school and my name was often ‘One Three Four Whittle, stand up please!’ It carries memories of homesickness, isolation, loss, fear, wariness, self reliance, and survival. I have kept the scarf because it is warm but mostly because it is a reminder that I came through to begin a useful and successful life full of experience that is my own and not imposed. 55 years of nightmares are nothing compared to the joy of everyday life. Sometimes a scarf is only a scarf.
2.
Uncle Stephen came into the room and announced that he had something magical and wonderful to show us. Uncle Stephen was a great traveller and explorer. He was tall with ginger hair and a dashing moustache. His visits were always unexpected.
He took a rock from his pocket and we passed it between us. It was a rough sphere and apart from its being quite light we could see nothing odd about it.
”Now look!” said Uncle Stephen. He held the rock in the palm of his hand, took a coin with the other, and gave the rock a sharp tap. Nothing happened. Again a sharp tap. We looked closer. Another sharp tap and the rock split.
3.
There, inside, was a fossil trilobite. He had known it was there, but how? We were very young and I felt I would have to live a long time to be where Uncle Stephen was.
I am much older now than he was then yet the mystery of the rock remains.
4.
My two older brothers sit behind me on cushion seats taken from a pram. I remember the picture being taken. My mother knelt in front of us holding her Box Brownie. I can still see her hair as she looked down at the camera.
She kept this tiny picture in her kitchen and I took it when we cleared her house when she died. In all we were seven boys and four girls but this was the picture she kept on display perhaps because it was never moved or perhaps to remind her of a time when her life was simple. Rationing was ending. They had just bought their own house – the one in the picture, the place where I was born in the bedroom at the top of the stairs. She was happy and we played pirates on those cushions on the sea of the kitchen lino.
5.
This photograph and the one following were taken in the Old Operating Theatre in Southwark, opposite Guy’s Hospital. The room was discovered in the roof space of St. Thomas’ Church in 1956. The picture is not so much a ‘memento mori’ as a ‘carpe diem’. We are not dead. The hidden space is revealed and now has a different kind of existence. Lives go on.
6.
And then Louise said,
“The other day upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wonder if he’s gone away.”
Our laughter gave away the distance between the days before anaesthetics and our taken-for-granted contemporary treatments.
7.
My grandson and I recreated this scene. We are building a new mythology of our family, a new legend except that his tags, the objects that prick and fix his memories, are more often caught photographically. He has seen and even used the scarf but has no concept of the number 134. He has seen the rock but it is already open and most of the mystery has evaporated. He cannot identify with the image of me and my brothers. It is so obviously old and I have always looked as I do now. Skeletons belong in cartoons and anyway, you can see the nuts and bolts holding the bones together. “That’s not a real skeleton, is it?” The meaning of the picture of him on the stairs lies in the experiment while I hold on as time passes.
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