Reflections

Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1981, p.66) writes the following about his experience of sifting through old photographs after losing his mother

‘Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labour; straining towards the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false. To say, confronted with a  certain photograph, “That’s almost the way she was!” was more distressing than to say, confronted with another, “That’s not the way she was at all”. The almost: love’s dreadful regime, but also the dream’s disappointing status- which is why I hate dreams. For I often dream about her … but it is never quite my mother: sometimes in the dream, there is something misplaced…I know it is she but do not see her features. And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labour: to reascend, straining towards the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again”.

His words eloquently verbalise phenomena that I too have experienced in my journey of losing my mum. In my search through the photographs however I was looking for her yes ; but I was also searching for ‘us’ , our relationship , mother-daughter …. As cut off physically from my motherland I feel an orphan of sorts and both loss of mum and of country are so intertwined in my heart and this absence I am keenly feeling at this period in life is something I do want to (ep) explore more with the aim of grieving and processing and hoping that my journey may perhaps allow someone else to grieve a bit and process their own form of loss.

I mined the family photographs that are digitalized in search of those rare ones of just the two of us and came upon this one which I have no recollection of yet the setting is familiar.

This image held my attention and I decided to intuitively just work with it and see what happened – discovering the printing on tea bags tute was gold and led to experimentation in photoshop – making sure the image is ‘background’ then selecting a portion and then Select --- Refine Edge … playing with filters, enlarging and focusing on certain parts.

Therese Moerman writes in her thesis The Magic Mirror (2012, p5-6) of her experience with photographs following the loss of her father whom she hadn’t seen for 15 years,

“As I looked through my archive of family photographs, I began to search for clues about who he was ….. The photographs serve no purpose but to remind me of what his face looked like at certain moments in his life. They show nothing about his inner life, his thoughts, his worries, his grief, his death. Yet I cling to these photographs. Why is this ? … Our private memories are inextricably linked to the way our personal history is presented in photographic form. Our photo albums are narratives of our past that can comfort us in time of loss, even if they do not reveal what actually happened….. when we create family albums we create myths, talismans, idealized versions of our lives we can remember fondly, preserved relics that make us feel safe in a constantly changing world.”

Maybe this is the draw card for me at this time – reflecting back, searching for something solid to hold onto amidst the constant flux- yet I do want to tease out of the images a sense of essence of her essence and mine and ours as it was together …. Seeing my mum through such different eyes as a separate person not just as mum makes the paper thin representation of the photograph even more futile to capture the complexity of a human being with time as a key factor since the photograph is a still image …..brevity of a second …. Much like the brevity of life or a cup of tea for that matter.