A good way of explaining my thoughts on the images of my family is the work of René Magritte.

Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist, who’s work shows ordinary objects with an unusual context. The one image which I specifically thought of with my project was ‘La trahison des images’ (The Treachery of Images), in which he has painted an image of a pipe, with the words “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (This is not a pipe). This image demonstrates a similar way of how I have been looking at the digitalised slides.

Whilst Magritte had painted an image of a pipe, it is not actually a pipe, and when Magritte was once asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco.

In a similar way, whilst these photos are of my mum, they aren’t my mum as I know her now. These images are also not how my mum would remember those moments, because she was seeing the other perspective, looking at the person taking the image, which is a perspective I will never be able to see.

These photographs also don’t allow me to know how the people within the pictures felt at that time, what was happening in my mums life at that time, who was she friends with? What had she been doing in school? Not being able to know these things makes it very difficult to build up a picture of what my mum, and all of my relatives, were like at that time.