At what point do photo albums merge? When a couple get together they bring their
own collection of family events; birthdays, holidays, shaky action shots of the
dog or flat landscapes that in no way resemble the steepness that inspired the
camera being pulled out of the bag in the first place, and put them on the
table like a hand of cards. I’ll show
you mine if you show me yours.
When I met Karin I had one full
album and another that had just been started; both blue and both made of those
strange tacky leaves that you tack the pictures underneath: over the years the
transparency becomes as dirtily opaque and obscuring as the fading memories. In the first there was a picture of
Portishead power station chimney falling as they demolished it, another of
someone’s boot apparently hovering over Lulworth Cove on some holiday, and an
image of us all standing at the foot of Cheddar Gorge the time Uncle David and
Auntie Kay brought their children over from Canada. Through the lens of
youthful optimism I thought I looked quite muscular without my age twelve
shirt, but the picture in its brutal accuracy evidences just a stick-thin
childishness.
Album two was later, obviously, because everyone knows
photographs need to be in chronological order.
Moving into teenage interests; cycling, a couple of girlfriends (not, I hasten
to add, at the same time, my teenage loins would have exploded; one at a time
was plenty), a field trip to Sand Bay where the wind howled sand into our eyes
all day – a huge price to pay for the lasting knowledge of plant succession. A school trip to Germany captured a
good few pages.
And that was it, very few images
for twenty odd years of existence; more a sampler of the many other images
sitting in the loops and folds of my brain. The album is a treasure box
but the memories are an archive: you don’t take pictures of mundane day-to-day
existence (at least you didn’t then; the ubiquity of cameras on phones now
capture every uneventful moment) but memories hold everything, all of it.
All that experience piles up and shapes you into who you are, and here I
was, skinny, an anger that contrasted with my angelic complexion, and with
enough restless energy to burst through the drifts of photographs to create a new
understanding of the world.
Karin’s album seemed to be
similar in structure but different in content; still the spiral binding that
held those clingy pages together inside a padded cover, but the inside was
sparse in landscapes and rich in people.
Parties; a satiny purple top that zinged against her autumnal hair like
kinetic art; Yorkshire terriers, so many things that just wouldn’t look right
in my album. Different grandparents,
people I didn’t know and some I was destined never to meet because they had
died. All labelled with whimsical
comments on thin strips of blue paper. I had the chance to look upstream where
she had come from, and she did the same with me, seeing the connections and
influences cascading over rocks, until we sat at the confluence together,
staring up, then down into the future.
Except of course, there is no
future. The future surely doesn’t exist
until you get there, and then it changes its name and function to the
present. The future is a fiction, and I
certainly couldn’t see it when I sat there in the watersmeet. I couldn’t see the children, the houses, the
melding of two people into a couple; all the things that were to come. I can see them now of course – I can cast my
eye all the way back from where I am now to where we were then, and see the
whole journey laid out in a long and sometimes jumbled set of photographs;
sometimes organised into albums, other times still in those card envelopes that
came from Boots and more latterly, Bonusprint, still clinging onto the
transparencies as if they are the origin of the image itself rather than the
experience.
Our blended photographs started with serial rows of my stuff
and her stuff, side by side – parallel lives, until bit by bit the odd picture
migrated across – I had a picture of Karin in my set, she had one of me, then
someone gave us a picture of each other, a mutual friend. My closest friend Paul came to stay, and then
he was our friend and the pictures and experiences united us. I actually created our first mutual album
many years later; the pictures had sat around in loose piles until I couldn’t
stand it any longer and bought a whole set of albums with pockets in rather
than the clingy static pages that failed to cling a few years later. Karin couldn’t be bothered with photographs,
and she certainly couldn’t be bothered with filing or displaying them. Everything was about now; the past was gone
and dwelling on it was a waste of time.
The pictures started to increase in number when Elly was
born – here was something to capture, something worth locking in. Karin started to put some pictures on the
wall in clip frames; she argued that at least they were used then instead of
just sitting in boxes.
And so the records of her life and my life became the record
of our life, and in our absence they stand as a publically open record of our
experiences. And in Karin’s absence many
of them stand now as the only record.
However, Karin’s challenge to that was, what is the point of preserving
a memory that belonged to someone who has gone?
The pictures I have serve as a time, a long time, where Karin and I
shared our lives, but from now on photographs will have different content,
different people; adding to the long thread of captured moments that stretch
back.
