Family of Photographs

Browsing James Fallows' post from China about the death of this father and his syblings' discovery of some never-before-seen pictures of his parents, led me to reminisce about those moments when the normal flow of life is unexpectedly punctuated by photographs.

Last month, on the last day of Thursday's Photo One class at ICP, when we were supposed to be displaying and critiquing each others' final work, John brought out a sheaf of black and white photographs of his grandmother and grandfather on their wedding day in the 1930s. He'd discovered them in a trunk he'd rescued from his mother's apartment. From a faded manila envelope he withdrew delicate traces of his personal history to share with us. And gingerly spreading the thin curled paper, tentatively at first - not wanting to damage the fragile surfaces - we found ourselves unexpectedly immersed in memories that weren't our own. He wanted to know how to scan the pictures without damaging them, but no one wanted to talk tech. We were already inside the reflecting pool, transported and beyond. And we wanted to be lost in the radiant eyes and smiles from a history we didn't know we shared, to be absorbed into the stories of these people we didn't know: their pearly elegance, tuxedos, lace veil, warm friends huddled at their sides.

This picture of my mother and father as they embark on their honeymoon was discovered by my cousin at the bottom of his mother's dresser after she died. My siblings and I included it in a tribute slideshow for our father on his 75th birthday last year. In my father's face I see my son; in my mother's sideways glance, in the blur of her hand on the champagne bottle, I hear her laughing as her sister, my aunt, teases them to smile for the camera. In-between my amusement at the tech embodied here (the faded 1961 color, the cracked emulsion) and the implied commentary on how air travel has evolved (you chose your own seat from a posting board? they let you open champagne in the departure lounge?), I'm drifting through emotions of loss and wonder, distracted from what I should be doing by memories of the young parents I never knew, their expectations, their journey. My mother died in 1994, long before this photograph was rediscovered, and I don't know if she ever saw it, or if she would have remembered the casual moment it memorializes.

Among the many things that photographs do, family photographs remind us that we share this experience of belonging to a much larger family, the family that discovers itself in photographs.

Tacita Dean's book of found photography Floh explores this notion visually, poetically. Moira Ricci imagines herself embedded within her personal photographic history in her series entitled 20.12.53-10.08.04, recently featured in this issue of FOAM magazine.