IN the three-part drama Shooting the Past by the writer and director Stephen Poliakoff, the largely eccentric staff of a London photo archive of millions of items try to save their collection from destruction. The building in which it is housed is to be developed as a business college. The organisation of the collection and retrieval of material seem as wayward as the staff. But salvation appears in the ability of one of them (Oswald Bate played by Timothy Spall) to link pictures from different sources to tell two compelling stories. One traced the life of a young Jewish girl who survived Nazi Germany; another fortuitously revealed the unexpected family background of the man behind the hostile takeover.
The inspiration is clearly the acquisition in the 1980s of the Hulton Picture Library by the multinational company Getty. But the main message is the power of the visual. Another story based around photographs is Jonathan Coe’s The Rain before it Falls in which an elderly woman dies leaving twenty photographs that are key to the story of her life and the search for a missing person who is blind.
Our identity as individuals leans heavily on memory and that in turn is influenced by what we have read, heard and seen. I’d like to suggest that the visual has particular power, although it may well create memory to which there is no entirely solid foundation. Herman Charles Bosman declared that memory was ‘the past held together with pieces of rusty wire’; but he might as well have said faded photographs. They are indeed memory banks, although memory as Timothy Garton Ash reminds us is ‘such a slippery customer’; a kaleidoscope of images that keeps revolving. Remembering, and forgetting, are fluid.
I’ve recently had personal experience of this. Reaching an age when decluttering becomes necessity for a variety of reasons, I gathered together all the remaining photographs and slides in my possession amounting to well over two thousand items. We no longer have the means to project 35mm slides, an unwieldy although sociable exercise at the best of times, and albums are bulky and prone to decay. Scanning seemed to be the obvious answer for what was worth saving; hundreds of pictures available at the click of a mouse.
The result was profound in a number of ways. I came across images I had never seen before, or more likely forgotten. They are now accessible in a sense not previously imagined and I have been able to use some of them productively. But above all there has been the networking spinoff. I have been amazed at the pleasure expressed by people unexpectedly in receipt of pictures of themselves from thirty or forty years ago. Of the twenty people I contacted only one showed no interest and the photos have apparently reached an even wider audience of enthusiasts. Clearly photos draw people together.
They are indeed an important means towards making sense of our personal histories and the way we feel about the past. Hilda Bernstein, the anti-apartheid activist, wrote that ‘just one generation and the door on the past starts to close … your lives too will become that other country’; a theme well used by writers such as L.P. Hartley and Milan Kundera. In Remember Me, Melvyn Bragg writes about the ‘infinite and unbearable space of memory’. Photographs are a means of making sure we shall not be entirely forgotten. But, yes, Bragg is correct: photos can be hauntingly unbearable. They are a constant reminder that the major impact of the death of those close to us is not just the loss of shared present and future; but above all of a shared past – in other words memory.
Given the importance of photography, it is surprising how casually the archiving of images is treated. As with all archives, understanding what to discard is crucial, but many people throw out photographs in a cavalier fashion less readily applied to books. This is strange as books are mass produced and each photo is effectively unique. Often the owners never bothered to date or identify their photographs. This leaves the finder with the intriguing task of trying to supply a date from the evidence in the image. This can have a silver lining in the detective work required to establish place and time. The first may not be possible, but the latter can be roughly established from context, personal appearance, fashion and even technological development; a photograph can be unmistakably linked to an era.
The archival fragility of photographs is most apparent when it comes to illustrating a book. It’s true that the Internet presents many options, although it may now be hard to judge authenticity, but there is a great deal of material that is hidden. Libraries still exist as do paper archives, although both are under severe threat in this age of barbarism; but consolidated collections of photographs are rare and have received little attention. Given their importance to our individual and collective identities, this is a strange omission.