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Extract from:- 'MEMENTO MORI MANIFEST: A RITE OF INHERITANCE' by ROSY MARTIN in 'What can a woman do with a camera' Edited by Jo Spence and Joan Solomon Scarlet Press, London 1995. |
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Fading fragments, traces almost lost, I turn these fragile pages in search of you. Who is this young man I never knew? This playful young couple "Brighton pier and on board". Only a piece of paper I hold now, a certificate of presence, I know only that has been. Your gaze fixed by chemicals. I can no longer touch you, change your expression by my interactions. I have now, only the evidence that one day, in the garden, you held me, protectively when I first learnt to stand on my own two feet, and walk away from you.
I reach down the utility cardboard suitcase, from the top shelf of the wardrobe in
the box room and find it again. The leather binding is disintegrating, the photos
tiny and faded to sepia, some now barely there at all. I had always been entranced
by this particular family album, containing photographs of my parents when they were
courting, aged 16 and 20. Who were that laughing couple on the beach at Felixstowe
and Brighton? Who was that young man, with his carefully studied resemblance to
current matinee idols, always posing, in every image, with cigarette in hand? My
father was said to look like Ronald Coleman, and wore that self-same neat moustache,
so fashionable in the thirties, all his life. | In 1986, I'm checking for evidence. In every picture, at least up till the 60's, he is smoking. Later, much later, (1990) I am searching for something unique to him, something 'essential' of that particular man, my father. But, of course, it cannot be there. The closest I come to it is the recognition of my father's ability to encapsulate the style of his times, through the clothes he designed and made, the poses he struck and his selection of snapshots. How is an autobiographical, self-reflective practice affected by changed outside realities, and how can it be responsive to such changes? Since 1983, (the late) Jo Spence and I had been evolving and developing a new photographic practice - phototherapy. Linking the discourses of representation and the notions of conscious and unconscious identities we added therapeutic skills to the creation of images, taking turns to be sitter/director and phototherapist. All this work is about process, change and transformations. Bringing theories, issues, ideas and intuition to exploring personal stories, through re-enacting tiny details and fragments of memories has enabled me to unpick the complex web of distress, pain and trauma from my past. This enabled me to make visible aspects long repressed or denied, and to get behind the screen memories, the simplifications and myths of others, to at last tell my own stories from my point of view. I also took up the positions of my mother and father, both in relation to myself as a child, and to explore their own histories. I found, on reflection, that I was also exploring aspects of my own psychic reality, which I had absorbed from and projected onto them. A dialogue between Rosy Martin and her mother | In-dependence Day? | Home | Enquiries | |