Monday 13 March 2017

if i had a photograph of you



Do you have a plethora of family photos scattered all over your house?

Or are you one of those organised people who manages to get all your loved ones in one place to pose for a professional shoot?

Are you happy with the obligatory school uniform grimace or have you forgotten what colour your living room is because of all the holiday snaps adorning your walls. 

Or maybe you don't have any; for one reason or another.

I love a good photo. Now this sentence will have my Father chomping at the bit as I spent the greater part of my teens turning the other cheek before the shutter clicked.  I hated my photo being taken.  Still do.

But I do love to see family photos on my walls; meticulously levelled up the staircase, lovingly angled on every spare windowsill, protruding from holiday sand-filled bottles on shelves, perched on any unused flat surface I can find. And I love going into other people's houses and looking at all their family photos too. A physiognomy ancestry before my very eyes.

My goodness, she's the spit of your sister. 

Yes, she has your eyes doesn't she?

Which side of the family is he from?

Is that your childhood house?

And then there's my fridge. Magnets are demoted in favour of old passport photos and random images from disposable cameras that were fortunate enough to be in focus.  

The photos in our home tell of school, yes, and holidays, yes and of course weddings. But they also tell of that day when she wouldn't listen and the day I was glad I carried a change of clothes in the boot of the car and the day when we knew it was serious and the day our lives changed forever. These photos will tell stories when we forget the minutiae of the moments.

If truth be told, in this digital age of disappearing images, I harbour a secret desire to fill one entire wall in a collage of us. But something tells me that it wouldn't just stop there.  

This post was inspired by The Photographer's Gallery: familyphotographynow.net:FamilyCollages

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