The thing that makes my project as full as it is, is due to the archive of images my Mum and Nan have kept over the years. A lot of people don’t have many photos of their parents, especially not in the amount that I have of my Mum, my Dad for example has about 3 images from the whole of his childhood, his parents split up and he went to boarding school and his set mum got rid of all of his possessions and photos, and so if i had tried to do this project on my Dad, it would have only shown the last 20 or so years of his life.

“Archives are important because they provide evidence of activities and tell us more about individuals and institutions. They tell stories. They also increase our sense of identity and understanding of cultures.” Source

The fact that my Mum and Nan have kept these archives is very important, because it allows us to remember things better, how their hair was, what the clothes were like, the places they used to see and the people they used to be close to.It has allowed me to gain a closer relationship to my Mum and understand that essentially, she has always been the same person, who is always happy and up for almost anything, she’s never worried about being sensible and doesn’t care if she looks bad in one photo. She’s always had a close family and a busy life.

To get more photos, I went into my Nans attik with my Mum, who hasn’t been up there in years, however I have been in the attic a lot myself as a child whenever I would be looked after by my Nan, so I know where a lot of certain bits and bobs are within the clutter from when I used to nose around.

I filmed my Mum whilst we were up there so I could remember how my Mum reacted to seeing certain things we found.

My Mum laughed quite a lot looking at all the different things written on all the supports in chalk.

From this trip, I found a huge box of my Aunts photos, in which I found many of my Mum, which I have scanned in.

When we were rummaging through everything in my Nans fairly cluttered Attik, I found a tin with lots of small bits in, which meant nothing to me, but my Mum was amazed I had found it, as it was one of her favourite things to play with when she was younger. The plastic bits all go together to build your own garden. My Mums Dad and Grandad both care(d) greatly for they gardens, and so I have a feeling this was where my Mum got this love of gardens from. Watching my Mum look through all the stuff in the time again was great, and she was so happy she’d been able to rummage through again and it seemed to bring back so many memories.

Another item I came across was this old rocking horse type thing, which I played on when I was younger, but remembered seeing this within one of the slides of my mums youngest sister.

In the back bedroom of my Nan and Poppa’s house, she has also still kept all the old games they used to play as children, some which are seen in the slides when they are opening them for christmas.

The last thing I found which relates to a few of the slides, are these toffee hammers they used to play with, and even used as part of costumes.

Although I probably won’t be able to use some of this stuff within my original planned photo book, I may be able to incorporate them into a smaller phonebook somehow, comparing old and new photos, as the photo book I have currently planned follows chronological order and so I can’t really compare photos from different times very well.

Colin Pantall’s Sofa Portrait are a series of images of his daughter watching TV on their sofa.

“My Sofa Portraits are about the physical and psychological absorption of Isabel’s childhood” Colin Pantall, Source

I find these images really honest because of the way they have been taken, he hasn’t made her pose and hasn’t dressed her up in any particular clothes, he has just taken photographs of times when his daughter is engaged with whats on the TV, and its interesting to see the way she sits and her facial expressions.

Although I am not so certain about including images of this type, I was considering taking photos of my families reactions to seeing the images and such and include them in the book as well, instead I decided to video them viewing the images, so I could remember their reactions to certain images and record them telling old stories that they were reminded of in the images.

The Longest Way Round is a photo book by Photographer Chris Dorley-Brown. This photo book contains 183 colour and 43 black-and-white illustrations containing notes and memories from his parents lives.

“There was a suitcase filled with letters, photographs, folders and boxes that sat in Chris Dorley-Brown’s studio year after year. In it were images, notes and memories from his parent’s past lives that weren’t quite ready for the family album. They were eventful lives.” Source

I really like the way this photo book is like a printed scrapbook, so as to not damage the originals, I have found with my familys photo albums that a lot of the images have been damaged from falling out the albums and being handled a lot.

I find the contrast of the old and slightly damaged/dirtied images and scans of documents compared to the clean white pages of the photo book a nice juxtaposition, and I think i would like to include an element of this within my photo book.

The digitalised slides I have retrieved weren’t looked at for a long time and so were in good condition, and a couple of them look as though they could be digital images, and so they don’t have quite the same effect as the scanned in physical photos and written down notes.

To try and add this element within my photo book, which will explore my mothers life and memories from when she was born to present day, I am going to look through the photo albums I briefly explored in my archive project to find images which bring certain memories to my mums mind, and I am also going to include scans of the book my nan wrote in to keep track of who was in each of the slides. I feel like this connection to my Mum’s Mum will help with making this a quite personal book.

A big part of my project is going to be formatting my photo book, with the mixture of old photos, my photos and scans of writing im hoping to include.

In order to do this in the best way possible I am going to look at some different ways of formatting photo books, and different ways of intergrating old and new images.

First i’m looking at Lydia Goldblatt, and her photo book, Still Here.

“In the series Still Here by Lydia Goldblatt (*1978 in London), the artist immerses her intimate photographs in sublime extremes of light and shade, tracing the fleeting shadow of personal existence onto enduring human narratives.” Source

Goldblatt’s book, similarly to my project, focuses on family, specifically her elderly parents, and they record three years in her parent’s lives.

“I didn’t want something observational, something with critical distance, and I never thought of taking the photographs as work; I don’t quite know what it was.” Lydia Goldblatt

These are a couple sample pages from her book Still Here, the layout is very simple, with her square format images being placed in the centre of each page. The images she has placed on each double spread compliment each other, having similar light levels, colours and/or subject matter. The images each focus on a singular thing, which I like because it highlights that one aspect object and brings it to the viewers attention, helping to build a story within the book.

“while the images depict the physical decay, indignities and vulnerabilities of old age without sentimentality, they also reveal the perverse beauty in wrinkled, mottled flesh and grey hair, making visual poetry out of a mole, a scar or even the stain of bodily fluid.” Source

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.