Jonathanjk’s Weblog

I came across this article (link) in the Guardian today by British Photographer Martin Parr.  I particularly like this sentence:

Most family photo albums are a form of propaganda, where the family looks perfect and everyone is smiling: we try to create fabrications about who we are.

Family albums always hold the happiest moments, i’ve never seen a photo album chronicaling the painful moments as much as the happy ones, photo albums only hold the smiles, not so the sorrows.

My sister has all the family photos at the moment, when I visit her, I find more photographs from the first years of our lives in China than I do for the 20 or so years lived in England.  There is even a photo album for the photographs from that time spent in China for others to view, but not for the ones from England; they live in jumble in a plastic bag, a special task for something so mundane.

It’s only come to mind now having read Parr’s article as to why one set of photographs are kept in a more meaningful way than the others, even though they live in the same place in my sister’s house (the cupboard btw).

None of the family have taken the time to organise the later period of our lives.  Now I’ve realised why.

After leaving China, my parents split up, (myself and my sister being left in the care of my father) the cameras were nonexistent at our birthdays and other social events (because typically our mother operated the camera) or any pictures taken were by those who replaced her, the fiancee and our grandmother. They also didn’t take nearly as many pictures as she would have done.

Looking back into the thin paper slices from our past, our mother was still there, she wasn’t entirely missing, she had her own set of photographs that we’ve collected and mixed in with the others, from the times when we could visit her.

Besides my saying so, there isn’t any photographic evidence of the pain of a family breakup from the photo collection.  My parents broke up twice in fact, none of that was recorded by the camera in between the breakups. Those moments arguably are just as important as our birthdays, of course they wouldn’t be photographed but my point is our family album doesn’t accurately chronicle that part of our family history, the album is a lie on viewing it. The propaganda as Parr calls it.

Bagging all the photographs together I think was an unconscious act of hiding the breakups, both photo collections are together because we can go through the pile of imagery as though our parents were still married.  As it stands at the moment, that bag is full of propaganda, trying to cover for something that we as children wished never happened. Anybody outside the immediate family wouldn’t see the propaganda we’ve accidentally created. I say accidentally because it was an innocent act on our part and we do tend to narrate what doesn’t exist in our family history when they’re being looked at.

Should I wish to be 8 years old again documenting the tragic moments, allowing me to present a more truthful account of our family history? What would be documented when for the both of us, it wasn’t a painful time, I don’t even remember witnessing any heartbreak or emotional moments, there was just confusion.
All we knew, was that we wanted to have our parents back together. Just like all young children who didn’t understand the complicated world of adulthood, it seemed simple to wish our thoughts into reality, the repurposed shopping bag is an extension of that juvenile desire.

So while it isn’t a truthful account of what actually happened it’s better to think of the bag of propaganda as something we as children wanted during at time.