Hello - happy Friday! Happy August!
We know it’s arrived here, because the three little boys next door are up and haring around their long, wild garden on adventures before 8am. (English schools break up at the end of July, and don’t go back until September.)
It’s a magical wake-up call.
For the most part, it’s all amicable, interspersed with the odd bust-up and “I’m telling mummy!” that’s quickly and kindly diffused by their Supermama (who may or may not describe the morning start as “magical”).
How has the last week or so been for you?
Last night, when visiting my dad in his care home, I showed him a photo, taken in the seventies in south eastern France, which I posted to Instagram yesterday.
Earlier that week, I’d told him how I’ve been sharing some of his photos, from our family albums, to accompany my writing here.
“You can’t see anything!” he protested, squinting at the hazy image on my phone and brushing off the compliment, as ever.
I reminded him of all the cherished memories he’d captured, how he’d painstakingly captioned each one and how much I’ve always treasured our collection. (He’d roll his eyes every time when, on visits home, I’d ask to “get out the albums”.)
It was my father’s passion for photography, and being the story keeper of our family life through the Seventies, Eighties and well into the Nineties, that was the inspiration behind my attempts to do the same when our children were little. And I kept it up, until I fell behind by a month or two, then twelve … and now, every year, I say “Doing the photo albums is going to be this winter’s project!”. Anyone else?
With thousands of memories stored in the cloud rather than printed and stuck onto pages for posterity, flicking through an album feels positively nostalgic now.
This week, when I brought up the subject of looking through them with my dad, his response was slightly different. ‘We should take a look at them — bring some of them in,’ he said, a sparkle in his clear blue eyes which seem to be becoming even clearer with age, somehow.
Praising his photography skills, I reminded him how seriously he took it, even using a light meter to get the exposure just right. ‘Everyone used them back then,’ he deflected.
My dad’s signature “back views” are the stuff of family legend. As I mentioned here, he always maintained that a photo taken from behind can capture so much more about a person or a moment in time than a conventional, posed one.
My favourites are the candid shots.
It’s the reason why my family has become used to me trailing a few steps behind them, taking random shots which absolutely become my favourites.
I told my dad that others have written kind words about his pictures. For example, writer and author
— who documents motherhood and family life so gorgeously with her photos and words in Create Anyway — commented “… this is random, but I LOVE every single photo in this post. Such a lovely wave of nostalgia in each one”.“It’s all you, dad,” I said.
After I posted the caravan image to Instagram yesterday, my friend, writer Sue Fulmore commented “How wonderful to have these images and the sparse words which, no doubt, represent so much”.
That’s just it.
My dad has always been a man of few words, and not one to express every emotion with a stream of them (leave that to his daughter). Instead, it came through in every fleeting family moment snapped, and every small detail noted.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps, too, a few words can be worth a thousand?
I’ve been struck by how old family photos can speak to our shared life experiences. While our stories are unique, those points of connection are so very often in the details.
I think this applies to photos, too. The print of a Seventies sun lounger, or the candy stripe of an Eighties sundress, can suddenly bring long forgotten moments to mind. I, too, find myself instantly drawn to vintage family pics on Instagram, in newsletters or on the covers of memoirs.
I know that for many, looking back at photos can be too painful, and every photo album will always evoke a mixture of emotions.
I am all too aware, also, of the photos that are missing from our family story — the ones I don’t have of my earliest months and year, of my birth parents and the foster couple who cared for me before I came to be with my parents and brother. I treasure the few I have, and I’ve heard such beautiful, wonderful stories of foster carers who carefully chronicle the young lives in their care for a time, in books for them to keep and look back on.
Whenever I hear or read that a photo of ours that I’ve shared has brought joy in recalling happy memories, or even been helpful in some way, it makes me happier than I can say (and, I suspect, my dad would ever admit).
And I can’t tell you how special that is — now more than ever.
So, thank you.
That photo of you and your brother - oh my heart. You both look like you should be in the 100-acre wood with Winnie and friends. Precious. And yes, as Katie said in her comment, I love that your photos bring these memories to mind. You have completely inspired me to do this next time I visit my parents. Also, on the candid shots - I feel like there were so few taken back then, compared to what we can so easily do on our phone cameras now, where I snap 10 different pictures of the same thing to find the best one at the end - and then, I don't delete the remaining. It's photo overwhelm. Back then, the few my parents took were all so special. That seems to make those photos a little more sacred. Perhaps that's one of the reasons I don't rush to put them together in an album and they all sit on my phone, because they don't feel quite as sacred. I dunno. Love this post. Thank you for the beauty here.
I love how your pictures evoke a sense of nostalgia for my own family road trips sans seatbelt. I don't think there are any pictures of our as we did not have a curator in my family.