We used to have a beautiful leather suitcase full of family photographs. When I think of photographs – the printed 4*6″ photographs you’d collect in a paper envelope with the negatives included in a pocket inside – I always think of that leather suitcase. How the colour was faded with wear and age. The metal fasteners.
I can remember a few times getting photographs printed, and receiving them in those same paper envelopes – but these are rare occurrences, and they were printed from the digital camera output.
The last (and only) time I remember getting photographs printed from what was quite probably a film camera, was from when I was 16 in 1998. I’d taken a series of photographs of me in my bedroom, wearing my long leather jacket. I also had them put the photographs onto a CD for me. I wish I knew where it was.
I recently gave my dad my albums of old family photos, as he has been digitising our collective photographic histories. Many of the photographs ended up distributed between siblings. I wonder how many have been lost over the years. From one roll of film, highlights will have been picked from the 24 (36?) to go into albums. Some will not have made the grade. Yet for every 24 moments we’ll have committed to posterity on a film camera, we’d probably now snap 240 or more on a digital camera.
Years would go by during which I wouldn’t look at a single old photograph, from the albums or from the brown suitcase. And yet so many of my memories are shaped by the images held by those old photographs. So many times I remember simply because there is a photograph of it. So many which I’ve forgotten because there isn’t.
Artist Diane Meyer takes old photographs, and obscures faces and other elements using cross stitch like an anonymising pixel blur.
These include old family snaps, old school class photographs, urban cityscapes, all sorts.
It’s beautiful.
I always love how magic happens when different artforms collide. Paint and collage. Stitching and photography. Anything which takes something old and repurposes it – altered books, sculptures using broken pottery, found poetry, vintage clothing Frankenstein stitched into something new.
I wonder if anyone finds themselves at one of her exhibitions, or flicking through a book, and recognises themselves in an obscured photograph. I wonder what memories might suddenly resurface upon seeing the forgotten image again.
The title I’ve given this post, “A candle shapes the memory,” comes from a Carol Ann Duffy poem called Where We Came In. Featured in Standing Female Nude.