Traces left behind

The subtle elegiac power of documenting your life - a thought dump

I can see on substack and elsewhere a resurgence of the document your life approach in photography.

Not exactly a new subject nor a groundbreaking one, however I do agree it is one that runs very deep indeed.

My perspective over the everyday photography of the family has been evolving over time .

I remember in the 1980s, how seriously I took the photography of my grandparents 80th anniversary celebrations. I am so glad I did this, the BW prints although of the RC kind still stand, as I have kept them away from light. Not really great photos to be clear, but they do exist, which is already a feat.

Disclosure: I should admit a propensity to deeply feel the passage of time. While I always knew I could not stop it, I was constantly trying to keep fragments with me, kissing my grandmother and trying to capture in my mind the gentleness, the perfume, the softness of her skin as I embraced her and figured in my head a time when this would no longer be possible, both rejoicing at the present and elegiac as a teenager can be at the inevitable.

Alas little did I know that our memories erode and get reworked over time. I cannot recall that exact sensation anymore however hard I try. Later in my life as I read and reread over time the fascinating “Recherche” by my favourite writer Marcel Proust, I managed to feel again certain of these forgotten emotions. All of a sudden through Proust’s exquisite craft, when talking about the narrator’s grand mother, a vivid flash would overcome me about what had gone, will not be back but suddenly is, oh so briefly, alive again in me.

Photography provides an incomplete but real door to a present soon to be the past, and a past becoming present again.

Maladroitely, I started to document in colour, as you would at the time, although never fully leaving my Black and White roots. Thank god for this.

In fact over the years I moved more and more into black and white again, discovering I could indeed get my family pictures done by Metroprint (free advert). The trigger was the birth of my youngest in 2000. I then started accumulating lovely family prints printed on fiber based paper by at the time the congenial, kind and very gifted Debbie Sears.

I am still moved that she actually printed my family snaps. Must have given her a change from the may be too serious stuff she was doing for the “real” clients.

My daughter, a capture from 2002


All that time I was also doing a lot of colour stuff, which is now clogging my Mac. all good, do not mistake me, but the caveat is that most did not make it to print. I have quantities of lovely Provia slides. However even the really good ones weren’t printed. I even only did low quality scans. Why? no idea.

Probably around 2003, captured on Provia 100F, very low quality scan


Then after Debbie left Metro, I was left a bit in disarray. Until I discovered I was living next to a printer lab. I had no idea at the time of what a master of his art Robin Bell was. For me he was an incredibly passionate, kind person with a completely crazy level of experience. If you are curious about Robin, please watch :

Going through his treasure trove of prints gave me the goosebumps. I knew then that Black and White was essential to my photography and to my quest to overcome time.

Circumstances changed on my side. Robin moved away from London. For a long while I was reduced to giclee from digital, happy to have prints done rather than not but was never fully satisfied.

Fast forward, I am now doing from time to time my own silver prints from small format film and a few times a year I do go on platinum week ends.

I have this very compelling urge to produce family pictures for people I may never know.

Let me explain:

As I have currently to go through my parents archive following their move into more adequate accomodation, a few things have become apparent.

While I was sorting the vast amount of photographs with my son, we both got stuck by a strange fact: the older the archives, the better the quality of the photo. Also more than places, portraits of long disappeared ones had the most impact on us.

They did have a massive emotional content, although people were unknown to us.

There was this photograph where I saw my mum’s great grandmother, born 1860, an image taken in the 1930’s. The power of photography is there. In print. Note that, in print.

The closer to present the photographs the less durable the prints, cheap and cheerful plastic coated colour photographs. With a massive decay. The ancestor born in 1860 was on a BW image, still looking strong. I don’t have that image for scanning yet, although that will be done.

I am a culprit too of the many colour prints of the 90s for family stuff before doing more focused photography, which became colour slide + BW. Guess what, the ones that still look strong today were BW printed on FB Warmtone paper. Colour prints are meee. Slides though hold something special, although I fear their decay, and scanning is just throwing this exquisite Provia colours to the 0s and 1s, i.e. into a black hole.

Strangely I see the Black and White prints as stronger emotionally as well as better photographically. I may be deluding myself I know.

So we all do these digital files by the 1000s. We may pooh pooh on the document your life stuff. However printing these is in fact essential. Albums / prints, all, yes please let’s do that, documenting our lives with our loved ones. Not for us, for them, the ones who will be going through archives in a few decades, trying to put the past together.

And please, put some notes on the back of the prints, that will make the task easier.

A few more recent photographs as I have taken this even more seriously. Perhaps because I feel myself this acceleration of time into oblivion, my oblivion. Going into partys like the narrator faced at the end of the Recherche with “le bal des têtes”, one of the most poignant and cruel scene of the entire novel.

My parents, almost a year ago before they had to move, this will be part of some platinum printing aside from my main projects, in spite of all its flaws.

This young one, already platinum printed

If you have read until this point my rambling, thank you so much. Not sure what you can make of it, is there a point?

I am decidedly an infrequent poster here, not even sure why I do this. Just that I feel that urge to share with other creatives, however flawed my prose.

I have this naive thought that may be someone somewhere will find it interesting or even will be touched.