Navigating personal memories in my family photo album

A photo album is an intimate object that plays an important role in the construction and image of family life. An album presents a visual narrative that can influence how a family is seen as well as evoking memories that expose moments in time and space. I came across a photo album, a traditionally bound book of family photographs kept since before I was born. The album is the oldest owned by my family - new, individually-owned albums and others belonging to the entire family have been bought; but all these are preceded by my recent discovery. The family photo album lay dormant amongst personal diaries, picture books, novels and art exhibition catalogues in a dusty cardboard box, dismissed by my family as evidence of my hoarding. I held the photo album for a while. Touching and opening its pages, I felt connected to memories on several levels of remembrance. I began to conjure up childhood scenes of home – the smells of umngqusho[1] and mincemeat on Sundays afternoon, the sounds from Umhlobo Wenene FM[2] in the morning, feet squeaking over shiny Cobra polished floors and speckles of dust swept with a grass broom from a neighbour’s yard.

When I encountered the album, I felt overwhelmed by its condition. The cover and pages are made from a material that has a hard-cardboard feel. Its corners have curled and edges worn from use. The acetate sheeting that used to cover the inner pages to protect photographs has turned dull, now held in place by Sellotape. The cardboard pages have yellowed with age, covered in brown coffee-like stains and reddish outlines on the cardboard from where photographs where once mounted. I am drawn to the scurf marks, dirt spots and fingerprint impressions – signs of an accumulated time which leaks from its decaying condition. As my fingers trace the pages, I notice that the book tells me that it needs to be handled with utmost care. I feel my way from page to page, listening to where a deteriorating page could tear or risk being severed from its spine.  

My family photo album does not have photographs inside its pages. In a sense, the album is empty, but not devoid of the ability to communicate as a visual object. The absence of photographs is not the issue here, because the residues of human touch, stains and traces left by the removed photographs provide me with items to look at and think about; to interpret the symbolic narrative experiences that attend to remembering or piecing together memories.

I ask: Can a family photo album be as significant, sentimental, valuable and bring people together if it contains no photographs? I would like to propose that a family photo album has the power to perform narratives in varying contexts, even more if it does not host a single photograph. This means that my family photo album can perform within and outside of larger conversations and relationships between people and photographs.

I am not relying on photographs or spending time wondering what happened to the photographs that were in my family photo album, but I am entering the subject of a family photo album to evoke multiple stories. I agree that indeed, the photographs’ very existence can be treated as the starting point of a conversation, in that photographs give meaning to a photo album as a communicative object (see, Langford 2001; Motsemme 2011; Sandbye 2014). Communication, however, is not merely visual, nor is it exclusively verbal. What I am proposing is focused along the multidimensional and inextricable relationship between (and beyond) the explainable and the visually-absent: memories, imaginations, emotions, senses and body language, amongst others. There are multiple significant objects in the home or domestic space that contribute to the interplay between image and seeing: for instance, objects such as clothes, books and journals inherently imbed in them physical traces that evoke multi-sensory, tactile and textural experiences. These examples are not wholly defined by verbal and linguistic forms of expression, techniques and characteristics of understanding. My family photo album embodies memories that concern the people who made contact with the album or who impacted on the processes of its meanings. The album carries on it marks of its history and of its representation as a timeworn object that was at one point an active record of the collective entity called the family.

In this essay, I start by letting you, the reader, in on my reflections. The creative reflection weighs heavily on my memories, as I navigate how my family photo album has the ability to provide me with immediate access to past histories affecting my present. I treat both past and present as realities that put form to my memories - into actions and as something that is performed in the everyday. This becomes a key guide in how I choose to write as I reflect, remember and make choices about narratives that linger as mnemonic clues of personal histories, experiences and identities. I am cognisant that memory can be partial and selective. I recognise that the stories and details I choose to remember are part and parcel of the process of telling stories through creative reflection and recollection.

I am a visual artist. This essay is an artwork. It forms part of my debut solo exhibition Skin, Bone, Fire: The First Album. As an artist, I work across disciplines of painting, sculpture, installation and live art, photography and video performance work.  Skin, Bone, Fire: The First Album is an ongoing project that focuses on personal experiences and story methods of remembering family histories. I use my family photo album as a visual material that aids the performance of past memories. The exhibition is my reflection on the photo album as an emotional register, occupying the spaces between people and people, and people and things. Thus, I use the photo album to evoke the experiences that materialise in the sensory and the imagination. In this essay, I use creative reflective writing as it relates to how I apply different interpretations and mediums in the exhibition. Writing as studio practice is an integral component of my art-making process. Therefore, this essay is the start of a series of artistic practices that are driven by reflection as creative process.

The use of a Photo Album

What is it about a visual object that speaks to us about how to enter stories, memories and histories? For, if one accepts that representations matter in how we re-member ourselves, what can be said about the image presentation in a photo album? I attempt to answer these questions by probing the album as an object and visual material that is able to perform outside the conventional outlook of family photographs.

My family photo album used to be filled with snapshots or “home mode” family photography. “Snapshot” type photography is a term that is originally associated with amateur photographs that make real what one is experiencing; it is a photograph that documents the everyday (Chalfen 1987). (When the Kodak culture first popularised the Brownie Box camera and roll on film in the 1800s, lives were documented in snapshots of photogenic moments (Chalfen 1987: 10; Sontag 2005: 41; Langford 2005: 3; Sandbye 2014: 3). Snapshots centre events about life such as family events (birth, birthdays, holidays), fashion portraits, friends, school trips (sports, career expositions, museums and competitions), and graduation ceremonies. The photographs can also include spaces like kitchens, bedroom areas and gardens, to mention a few.[3] The memorialising of each moment in a photograph is more important than the quality of the image. It hardly matters how comprehensively the activities captured are photographed so long as the memorable moment is recorded and will be cherished past its occurrence (Sontag 2005: 6). These can be described as moments worth seeing, collecting, gifting, framing, displaying in the home or preserving photographs like souvenirs or mementos. The importance of the photo album is to offer indisputable evidence that a trip was made, an act was carried out and that fun was had (Sontag 2005: 6).

Photo albums are treated differently to how people store, maintain, preserve and distribute photographs. An album can mean a display in photo frames, photographs stored in shoe-sized cardboard boxes, plastic sleeves or envelopes. For example, my family photo album was almost always hidden from view when it had images – appearing concealed or forgotten. The album was kept in a dark-wood display case in the main sitting area of our home. The ways in which my family photo album was stored, within the context of being concealed or forgotten, bear witness to the idea of safe-keeping. Thus, when considering how I found my family album in the dusty cardboard box, it is apparent that I went to great lengths to hold onto it, particularly in keeping it safe through the years of its existence as an object that evoked memories, stories and meanings – as it intrinsically connects me to the surreal records of everyday life, which might have nothing to do with the object itself, but the longing to not forget.

To echo Nthabiseng Motsemme (2004: 5) it is through the photo album that I become a tourist of my own past. Writing from a perspective that explores ways in which ordinary women speak about their traumatic pasts, Motsemme (2004: 5) states: “It remains true that within the surge of interest in memory work in the public arena, we continue to search and immortalise memories in places we can visit.” Explaining further, she considers photo albums as a source of information for hidden subjectivities and the sensibilities comprising acts of recovery, repression and reinvention (see Motsemme 2004: 914). Motsemme describes the photo album as a tool for people to open up, document interconnections between family and friends, and generational connections. For example, the photo album is an excellent way to generate intimate and humourous encounters over baby pictures, eccentric-looking poses and old dress styles. I agree that sharing memories that emerge from the pages of the album introduces a ready intimacy to the environment of events often forgotten and lost, but not to the point of not being able to remember some things that had been forgotten (Motsemme 2011: 138).

Showing off photographs in an album contributes to the socio-cultural traditions that are shared with family and friends or are used to enmesh new relations and friendships. The moment my family photo album was brought out, it evoked embodied connections of viewing and telling stories, especially regarding the significance of personal experiences, affect and sentimental value. I remember my mother and father would often ask to see the album when they had friends, aunts and uncles over at our home. In the middle of their conversations, my parents would show their visitors photographs of people, thus putting a face to whoever they were talking to or sharing memories about. In that moment, the person holding the album will then take the time to go through the photographs patiently, and as a result, unearthing more stories about a particular time and space. It is in the experiences of contact and touching the photo album that a deep-seated joy, laughter, love and beauty is awakened, since most photographs in an album are about celebrations and milestones those who are in the photographs hold dear.

The use of a Touch

“Sukuyitatsha ifoto ngeminwe yakho, uyayigcolisa. Yibambe ngoluhlobo, apha emacaleni. Uya bo, kanje, futhi ungayigobi kakhulu ngoba ezakho izandla zincinci kakade.”

“Make sure you do not touch or leave finger marks on the photo,” my older sister would say. This she learnt from how my parents instructed her. “Use the edges... come, let me show you,” while taking the photograph with her hand. She would then hold it with the palm of the hand open and fingers on the edges or sides of the image. At the time, this was impossible for me to do because my fingers were not that long. I was still young.

The record of photographs in my photo album was often tempered with by my older sister Penny and myself. This means there was no one compiler or single authorship of the photo album because the earliest photographs where collected by our parents – my father being the one who bought the album. It is the various compilers of one photo album who bring this object together and into the collective memory of the family (Langford 2005). The compilers play a vital presence in the ways of defining family and photographically representing this unit for posterity. It is interesting, now, to think of the tempering of the photographs as ordered by Penny and I as a way in which we expressed and navigated what was happening around us, and what we were understanding to be a family life.

The portraits of my mother and father in their youth, with friends, relatives or co-workers often migrated forward to the first pages of the album. My sister, myself and later my brother’s photographs as infants, toddlers and teenagers migrated to the back of the album.[4] Other times, the photographs of my sister, myself and brother as infants and toddlers would be moved forward next to our parents for lack of photographic moments where we are all in one family photo or a family group photo. I remember times when we asked our parents about the dates of their individual photographs, because we wanted to estimate their historical timelines with the years of our birth dates and ages of specific images. My parents did not have a photo of the two of them together, either of them as a young couple, or at their wedding or attending some event together.

Photographs, as emotional registers, are central to the shifting relationships through which the sociability of objects become creative ways of understanding sensory knowledge. In “Photographs and the Sound of History” (2005), Elizabeth Edward describes photographs and voice as integral to performative ways of telling histories. In what she (Edwards 2005: 27) terms as “relational object”, this means the photograph and voice are connected in how information is shared from one person to the other and from one generation to the next. The connection of photograph and voice is not reduced to simple verbalising of content, a playing back of a forensic reading. Rather, photographs have dynamic and shifting stories woven around and through them, thus imprinting themselves in sensory and embodied experiences of oral histories, memories, emotions, sounds, gestures, in visceral and affective ways.

I am also drawing on Edward’s notions of touch and sight that invites intimacy between families and friends gathering, and bodies in close contact.

Touch is, in many ways, the most intimate of the senses, for it registers the body to the outside world. It is arguably the touch on the photograph that mediates the presence of the ancestor, confirming vision, in that touch and sight are bridged to define the real (Ong 1982:168–9) as the finger is run over the images (Edwards 2005: 40).

In both individual and group settings, people are looking, feeling, fiddling and stroking the surface of the photo album (or photographs). Such proximity opens up nonverbal and non-linguistic channels of communication. Touch becomes this physical engagement that strengthens the impressions and senses that connect people to things, to the image as an extension of the ancestor in the photograph, to the fulfilling desire to hold something or someone very close (Edwards 2005: 40). In a sense, the personhood invested in the photograph is made material in that the responses are real through indexical traces that go beyond space and time.

It is the proximity of touch and site that produces the fulfilling significance of my family photo album, even though the album does not have photographs inside. My engagement stems from the people with whom I share the album and the sensory spaces or settings that perform and embody specific messages in the traces and residues imprinted in the album, and the memories that define its condition as a timeworn object. My family photo album, for example, was large enough to have Penny and me spreading it across our knees or on the floor. With the protective acetate covering over the photograph, it meant we could touch or point at images. The surface of the album’s pages gave a sensory embrace, stroking and handling of a photo album.

Moreover, there is closeness and intimacy as bodies touch and cluster around the album, thus, creating an environment for the affective experiences. I am interested in how affect makes an object belong to a world of encounters. Affect that is found in those visceral and tactile relations that are beyond conscious knowing and emotional intensities (Seigworth and Gregg 2009). That is, affect’s real power lies in the intensities of body, thought and emotions that can suspend the body’s encounter with other bodies or objects in a momentary or (sometimes) more sustained state of overwhelm; body and the object’s capacity to affect and be affected (Seigworth and Gregg 2009). From this perspective of an affective experience, the intention of the photo album, therefore, means understanding emotions as part of or central to what is actually being lived through photographs, and suggests that family photo albums must be seen as “doing” an act of communication and symbolic activity (Sandbye 2014: 3).

The use of a Moment

I find myself in moments of contemplation, where I am intensely filled with emotions when looking and touching my family photo album. When Penny passed on from a sudden illness, at only 16 years of age, the album remained out of mind and out of sight, never touched or physically encountered. Dealing with her loss was difficult. What was even more challenging was not talking about her; it was never encouraged. I was young and did not understand or think about the pain my parents were going through, losing their first-born child. As a family, we seem to have dealt with our feelings in a loud state of silence. Through what Motsemme (2004: 910) calls “the language of grief and pain”, silence can be viewed as an “unspeakability of suffering”. She suggests, “silence is used by mothers to create illusions of stability, of constancy and matter-of-factness particularly for their children to maintain some kind of moral order in their homes.” Both my mother and father embodied this silence, especially after my sister’s death, this language of grief and pain is found in the strategies of coping.

“Khawudlulise natsika, ndim ofune ukuyibona...” Pass the album, it’s me who asked for it first, my father said, stretching his hand towards my mother, who then responded: “Linda, ayilolifa eli. Nam ndisayijonga.” Wait, it’s not like this album is an inheritance. I am still observing it.

I had decided to place the album on the coffee table in the middle of our living room where my parents enjoyed a conversation together over warm bowls of Maltabella sorghum porridge. My intentions were mainly driven by curiosity, to see and hear how they would recollect this family photo album.

When my mother was done, she passed the album to my father: “Lilifa nyani.”

Indeed, it is like an inheritance, was his first comment upon observing the exterior and condition of the album. But to his disappointment, he said “akho z’foto mos apha.” There are no photographs inside.

“Tsho tsho, ayinanto! Sorry, it’s empty!” my mother said.

She just wanted to have the last word.

My father returned the photo album to my mother and said nothing afterwards. Then they continued with their conversation.

Such moments fail to create stable narratives like photographs, but my intentions were also not to ask questions or convince my mother and father about how the album made me feel in that first encounter of finding it in the cardboard box.

My objectives so far have not been based on an investigation of what happened to the photographs or when were the photographs removed from this old family photo album, by whom and why.

As this text demonstrates, my family photo album evokes memories which are especially what is left on the surface of the pages of the album. I may not know the answers or understand the questions this album raises, and so I continue to search.

Notes

*I am most grateful to Gladys Kalichini and Fouad Asfour for discussing several aspects of my art practice with me. I also thank Thabo Jijana for his added comments. I am grateful to the Online writing workshop: writing as visual practice for the encouragement and Wits Postgraduate writing group: Practice-led research for taking the time to discuss my work.

[1] Umngqusho is an African dish, especially amongst the Xhosa people, made from variants of beans, samp, mincemeat, onions and potatoes.

[2] Umhlobo Wenene is a South African radio station that serves the isiXhosa speaking communities predominantly in the Eastern Cape and Western Cape.

[3] In a family photo album, snapshots can also be accompanied by a collection of post cards, letters and other decorative paper cut outs and pictures from magazines.

[4] We remembered nothing about these early photographs accept what we were told by our parents who would tell us what sounded like different stories each time. However, the asking never stopped, because for my sister and I the investment in the family album was something we were growing to see in our neighbours, media and what we were taught at school.

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