Me, My Self and the Photographic Eye

Who Am I?

Getting to the essence of Me has been challenging in many ways, some of which have been quite negative and unnerving.

First of all, I had to work out who I am, and then extrapolate from that the aspects I wanted to emphasise in this project.

Like most people, I have bits of my life I remember with a smile, and bits I’d rather forget. Formative experiences, both pleasant and traumatic, have all mixed together to make Me: childhood, education, parenting, friends and relationships, career path… all these things influence what we turn into. I didn’t enjoy trying to pin down who I was – it was a process strewn with the recollection of past events which I have been very adept at forgetting over the years. My current state of emotional and physical decrepitude inevitably coloured what I remembered of the past and the whole exercise became dangerously negative and soul-destroying. In order to redress the balance, I made an effort to list one positive attribute/character trait/historical event (or whatever) for every negative one, and in this way I ended up with a less distorted picture of Me.

I found Annette Kuhn's article entitled 'Remembrance - the child I never was' [1] profoundly disarming. When I came across it (thanks, Mark) I was quite far into the first draft of this work, and had already decided that I was walking through scary emotional territory. Kuhn's account of a photograph of her taken as a six year old child, by her photographer father, contained so many resonances that I could have written it myself. Whilst the trauma of her childhood was not the same as mine (her 'father' turned out not to be so) everything else was just as I remembered it.

The key to Kuhn's story is how a simple family album shot (actually, not so: her father approached his family portraiture much as mine did, with a professional stance, see p 398) can become the locus for a whole raft of facts, inferences and false memories. For Annette Kuhn the adult the photograph of Annette Kuhn the child takes on an iconic significance. The same is true of the photograph of me taken by my father which I have used as the cornerstone of my work on this project.

Annette Kuhn, aged 6, taken by her father, early 1950s. (c) Harry Kuhn, courtesy Annette Kuhn archive.

Helen Williams, aged 6, taken by her father, 1963. (c) H 'Wyn' Williams, courtesy the Williams family archive.

Kuhn tells us that "Photographs are evidence, after all. Not that they are to be taken at face value, necessarily, nor that they mirror the real, nor even that a photograph offers any self-evident relationship between itself and what it shows. Simply that a photograph can be material for interpretation; evidence, in that sense: to be solved, like a riddle; read and decoded..." (p395)

Crucially, she goes on to say "A photograph can certainly throw you off the scent." (p395) Looking at the two photographs here, for example, would give the viewer not the slightest indication of the relationship between the subject and the operator; and by revealing the fact that in both cases the relationship is that of father-daughter, the issue is clouded even moreso because of the expectations embedded into such a pairing.

Kuhn argues that the memories which arise when examining a photograph "do not simply spring out of the image itself". Rather, they are the result of a complex interaction between the past and the present contexts, the viewer and the photograph and surrounding all of this, the cultural and historical influences none of us can avoid.

To personalise this: my memory of the 'portrait sessions' held in my house when I was a child are largely positive; I enjoyed the process of dressing up, posing and playing to the camera (until, that is, the inevitable bedtime tears). These positive memories are no doubt correct - I'm sure I do not recall the sessions falsely - but they are in absolute conflict with most other memories I have of the parent-child relationship. Perhaps that is why I find this all so difficult: the (photographic) evidence does not back up my personal history as I recall it.

I have elected to use a photograph from my past as a symbol of Helen the Photographer's Daughter. I have juxtaposed it with my own work in an attempt to illustrate my journey to autonomous photographer. Annette Kuhn used her childhood photograph to "make myself into my father's daughter". As I have used my childhood photograph to do exactly the opposite, this has to be the point at which Kuhn and I part company. I must, however, let my new-found doppelganger have the last word:

"Family photographs may affect to show us our past, but what we do with them - how we use them - is really about today, not yesterday. These traces of our former lives are pressed into service in a never-ending process of making, remaking, making sense of, our selves - now." (p399)

Scary!

References

Kuhn, A. Remembrance: the child I never was. In Wells, L. (Ed.) The Photography Reader ch 36. pub Routledge 2003