The girl in the photograph is taking a photograph; holding a camera up to her face in order to gaze through its view finder. Whatever she’s looking towards is to the left and out of frame. For balance she leans a hip against a wooden pylon, behind which a plain country road stretches out in to the distance. The girl in the photograph is my mother.
There’s something curious about a photograph of someone taking a photograph. I think of the self-portraits of Vivian Maier and Lee Friedlander, their own reflections captured in the act of image-making in mirrors and shop windows. The thing becomes a referent to itself. It’s also a rarer image to see in the category of the family photograph. In this instance, I picture a chain of observers, both bodily and mechanical, producing frames interleaved by a plurality of gazes. The chain begins with me, looking down at the picture. But in between myself and the image of my mother I see my grandmother from the back, the person who took the photo, short cropped hair as remembered from photographs of her during that period, kneeling on one leg perhaps, peering through her camera up at her daughter. Then there is the object itself.
The photo had been in an album. The black one, or perhaps the red cloth-covered one. Things I compiled in my teenage years. I took it out at some point last year. Put it in a plastic folder filled with ephemera; research material towards unknown ends. Later, in the Autumn, I bought it to my studio. Sat it on the table. Blue-tacked it to the wall.
Are those loops I see? Do I see them or do I feel them? Or perhaps, do I remember them? Are they rings of light? Haloes of hair? Circuits of skin? What weight do they have? Are they soft? Where do they link? Who do they link? Not exactly us. They are interstitial. Seeing them means I am somewhere else. How can I say what the photo is, this piece of image? It is not memory, but it is connected to memory, of her, knowledge of her which accompanies the looking.
In Ghost Image, Hervé Guibert compares photography to the fairground game where hoops are thrown at objects with the aim of landing a target. The capture seems achievable, even easy, but is of course designed to end in failure. He writes:
I don’t know why I want - gratuitously at first - to couple these two forms of seduction, ring toss and photography. Does the game, the gesture, have anything to do with the act of taking photographs? We covet an object - the stake is insignificant - we miss our shot or hit the bull’s eye, the ring slides over it, we leave with nothing.
In attending to this image of my mother at ten years old (the same age, incidentally, that I was when she died), looking at it, writing about it; some attempt at capture that might be compared with the ‘ring toss’ dilemma is taking place. It is something to do with a blind, clawing reach for a sight of her - a lost game. And it is something to do with understanding who I am without her, who I was when she was around, who I am in the presence of her memory.
Sarah Raphael was an artist. In the small section of childish facial features seen side-on between camera and cropped hair, I recognise something in her expression; a focus she had when she painted and when she drew. In the last few years of her life, the period of time that my memory of her is in sharpest focus, she was working on a series of huge, canvas-stretched paintings. I’d often watch her working in her studio, the studio that later, after she died, became the family dining room. I remember her angling the enormous wooden stretchers together and knocking them closed with a mallet, pulling and stapling the canvas around the rectangular wooden frame. I remember her sketching out the composition with a pencil, first on the floor, then with the canvas leant against a wall. As I write, an impression develops in my mind. I see her, in front of the last painting she was working on before she died, a painting she never finished. She’s turned towards it, away from me, as she so frequently was. I had come down to see her in the middle of the night. She often worked at night. She is squatting, perched on a low stool wearing her green and black checkered night gown, a brush in hand. A dreamscape of hyper-colour surrounds her like a halo, aglow against the patches of raw canvas yet to be filled. My child’s eye flies towards an infinite horizon, hundreds of sections of pink, purple, blue, green converging above and below, impossible multitudes.
Whilst doing a clear out the other day I came across a photo of my little sister and I that I hadn’t seen for many years. We’re in Mum’s studio, but by this time a dining table sits at its centre. The photograph must have been taken about a year after her death. It looks to be Christmas day, wrapping paper all over the table and paint-stained floor. My little sister, Becky, smiles for the camera in a pair of new pyjamas. She is 5. I sit in a chair to the right. I am 11. In the background, beyond the dining table, there’s another surface, covered in piles of clutter. I recognise a maquette mum had made for a sculpture, sat amidst cans of blue spray mount and a sprawl of tools. Underneath the table sits a tightly packed pile of paper, cardboard, books. The table must not have been touched that whole year. And of course I remember, how did I forget? Her clothes, her makeup, bills, receipts and the rest of life’s mess (and she was messier than most) remained untouched for some time. On the left side of the photo I notice a small section of a painting, the one she never finished, caught in the frame. I’m reminded of its presence, to which we all somehow became oddly numb. How it stayed where it stood until the house was sold four years later.
The notion of ‘inframince’ literally translates from the french as ‘ultra-thin’. It refers to the almost imperceptible difference between two seemingly identical things. For example, what’s the difference between the painting my mother was working on before she died and that same painting she was no longer working on after she died? For it became something else after she was gone. A rectangle of her absence. Mute despite its exuberance. In much the same way photographs of her now stood for something else. Something lost.
An artwork is no longer the artist’s once it’s complete. It flies the nest and becomes its own thing, out in the world. But an unfinished artwork? That remains in the possession of the artist. And the unfinished painting of a dead artist? I’m not sure. And so the painting sat there, occupying almost an entire wall, watching us each mealtime. And with no one to possess it, I suppose it possessed me.
Last month, I travelled up to Enfield to visit the facility that stores most of Mum’s work. It was a cold day and I regretted not wearing more layers as I walked from Brimsdown train station, gripping my coat and phone, following the blue line on googlemaps through a grey industrial estate. I’d asked the storage manager in advance to pull out the painting, Time Travel For Beginners. It was there waiting for me when I arrived, perched against a row of other artworks packed and stacked on a shelf. I sat and stared at it for some time, writing notes here and there.
As I sit looking at the painting I see her, in front, behind. I watch her working, the thing I did so often as a child. I sit now and watch myself, watching her. And as I look at her I form an image. The image sits on top of other images.