Merging

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.