The story keeper
When a photo is worth more than a thousand words.
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. It’s a magical wake-up call and, for the most part, amicable—apart from the occasional “I’m telling mummy!”, and swiftly diffused altercation.
Last night, when visiting my dad in his residential care home, I showed him a photo, taken in the seventies in south eastern France, which I also posted to Instagram.
I reminded him of all the family memories he’d captured, painstakingly captioning each one. ‘We should take a look at them — bring some of them in,’ he said, a sparkle in his clear, pale blue eyes which somehow seem to be becoming even more clearer with age.
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. With thousands of memories stored in the cloud flicking through a photo album feels positively nostalgic now. (Although, my daughter has a developed a passion for what she, and her twenty-something friends, call “film camera” photography.)
Praising his skills, I reminded my dad how seriously he took his hobby, even going so far as to use a light meter. ‘Everyone used them back then,’ he deflected.
My dad’s signature “back views” are the stuff of family legend. As I’ve mentioned before, he always maintained that a photo taken from behind can capture so much more about a moment in time than a conventional, posed one.
My favourites are the candid shots.
It’s the reason why my family is used to me suddenly trailing a few steps behind, taking random, often blurry shots which become favourites.
I told my dad that others have written kind words about his pictures, including
— who documents motherhood and family life so gorgeously with her photos and words in Create Anyway — who 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, responded “How wonderful to have these images and the sparse words which, no doubt, represent so much”.
My dad has always been “a man of few words”, and not one to express every fleeting emotion (leave that to his daughter). Instead, he captured them in photographs.
I’m struck by how old photos can connect us. So often, it’s in the details: the print of a Seventies sun lounger, or the candy stripe of an Eighties sundress, can suddenly bring our own memories to mind. I’m always drawn memoirs with old family pictures on the cover. I find them fascinating.
It’s also the photos that are missing, that were never taken or were not kept—that didn’t make the photo album edit—that tell a story. I treasure the few prints I have of my birth mother and I when I was just a few months old, and I am sure the fact that I have so many family photos of my own children, from birth upwards, in display around the house is deeply significant.
The phrase “a picture can be worth a thousand words” is attributed to an American newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane, in the newsroom.
My dad’s with Arthur.
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.