Preserving the Present by @fkbphoto
Oct 24, 2022
Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going – Tennessee Williams
Do you have a favourite song or smell that can transport you right back in time instantly? For me, it’s the opening to Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack, or the smell of the Body Shop’s Dewberry perfume, both of which make me feel like I’ve jumped straight back to special times in my teenage years. Music and scent are powerful memory triggers - but for me, when it comes to memory lane, there’s nothing I love more than looking through old photographs.
Nothing is better at evoking memories than a visual of reminder of that favourite top you had in primary school, the childhood friends who came in and out of your life, and that dodgy haircut you had at 14 when you thought it might make you look cool (might just be me). My mother-in-law recently presented me with a suitcase full of old photographs from her own early years and wedding, to my husband’s childhood and beyond. This was absolute HEAVEN! I sat down with a cuppa to devour the treasure trove in front of me - the fashions, the home décor, the emotions and events, the people who are no longer with us ...and this got me thinking.
What is it about old photographs that is so special? Is it the connections and links to our past, or the pasts of our loved ones, that we find fascinating? Or is it because prints shot on physical film were more of a rarity before digital cameras and phones drowned us in a sea of never-ending content, and somehow feel more precious for it?
As I looked through the suitcase, I asked lots of questions – whose wedding was this, wasn’t there a strong family resemblance in this shot, which holiday was this taken on? I poured over each picture, from the people in it to the format and colours of the prints themselves.
For me, I think the beauty of having photographs to look back on is that they remind us of the fleetingness of life. The years are short, but the days are long, so the saying goes, and the older I get, the more I understand this! Now more than ever we are swamped with sensory overload from the moment we wake up until we switch off the bedroom lamp – we take hundreds of photos every year, but do we really stop to bank the memories? From our first steps to our last breaths, life is a catalogue of moments, and our loved ones will only be able to share in so many of them.
As the daughter of a photographer, I’m fortunate to have a collection of childhood photos from a time when photography wasn’t the phenomenon it is today. What fascinates me about these is that they tell me what my family (and a tiny me) were like further back than my own memory will take me. Many of these photographs are precious, and rather than hide them away in an album, I like to have them where I can see them. Same goes for anything I’ve taken digitally or on my phone – I still make the effort to print the images that are special. As someone with a pretty rubbish memory I love to look back on past holidays and weekends away and remember the people we met and the places we saw.
To me, photography is a way of documenting the present, in order to preserve history, to enlighten those who see them in the future. And although I have no idea what the equivalent of a suitcase full of prints will be in the next 20-30 years, I really hope that images don’t become throwaway – that they retain their meaning – as the format and its place in our lives continues to change and evolve.
Written by @fkbphoto
