The only photos that I carry with me and look at every day are photographs of my children, taken at odd ages, many years ago. These are the most important photographs I shall ever see or own. It doesn’t matter that they scarcely resemble the people they represent and the precise moment they were taken is forgotten. Their value is only in the memories that they hold for me.
These are the kind of memories ‘that link us to our losses‘;
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.
(Larkin, Reference Back; 1955)
Old photographs of people we love are inevitably sad, even if not exclusively so, because of the intimations of mortality they contain; our own as well as theirs. I know this as I continue to avoid sorting through the photographs I inherited after my mother’s death several years ago.
It seems the opposite is true too in that photographs of young people who we will not see grow old can also provoke a sharp awareness of the impermanence of being.
This weekend, I took a handful of photographs of my eldest grandchildren while out walking in the hills near where I live. My grandchildren are noisy, crazy, buzzing.
For now, the photographs are merely the record of a breezy, autumn day out with grandad. Maybe the pictures, if they survive, will hold a memory for them that will link us well beyond this weekend and a walk in the hills together; at a time when I will exist only as a memory in a photograph that is just too sad to look at.
George, aged 6. Taken on the 14th October, 2017. The Skirrid.
Tony, aged 4. Taken on the 14th October, 2017. The Skirrid.
Meanwhile, Leo was at home just being Leo.
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