Time Out of Time

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I've written quite a bit, in the past, about photographs and time: how sometimes, with a photograph of unknown provenance - no personal connection - possible narratives present themselves to the mind unbidden. As I said last night, that's the nature of the pattern/narrative-seeking human mind. Sometimes, as with my late-seventies industrial photographs of the Black Country, the subject is known [as I took them in the first place] but the background detail has been forgotten over time. Pictured, however, is a photograph that has been part of my life since early childhood, and which currently hangs in our dining room. The very young girl in this over one-hundred-year-old studio photograph is my maternal grandmother. This image - then in a rather heavier, earlier frame - used to hang in the front bedroom of my great-great aunt's home - Fairview, Fromes Hill, Herefordshire - which my sister and I used to share as very young children ourselves, back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when on holiday there with our family. Only my sister Karen and I have a direct link with and memory of this image now. I turned seventy-one last Friday, and I'm acutely aware that this link with this particular past rests with the two of us alone. The notion that this photograph will eventually pass into either the category of assumed narrative or simply be only partially understood, carries with it a certain poignancy and sadness...

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