I recently had my 50thbirthday and my wife was kind enough to arrange a party for me and all of our family. Between us we have seven children and six grandchildren so family parties such as this are very rarely brought together.
At the party, people had brought old pictures of them and me so this acted as a ready made archive right at the time that I was considering what to bring together for this exercise! The pictures gave me a source of old images that had never been brought together before but I still needed to decide what themes to use to bring together a particular set of a few images from my source which was now about 400 images.
Change over Time
These first set of images looks at specific images of the same topic but over a timeline, a chronotype. Each set features myself but my role in each set is different.
I found it fascinating to look at each set and see how each set has changed not just in terms of the ageing of the style of the people within the images but also in how relationships have changed.
Set 1 is Mother and Son. The first image was taken in 1975 and shows me as a child, smaller than my mother and portrays me as being under my mother’s care. The second image is taken in 2013 and the roles are portrayed almost as a complete reversal, I am taller than my mother and it is my arm around her as if I am protecting her.
Set 2 is myself, my brother and my parents. In this set, the roles have not really changed and it simply that we have all got older over the 30 year gap. Since the main thing I am trying to capture in this set is the role of brother, it is perhaps not surprising that the role has not changed.
I created Sets 1 and 2 in the order that I have shown them here. When I realised how there is a difference in what the two sets show (the change, or not, in relationship), that prompted me to create a set that pulled together different roles that I myself have adopted over time; a subset of my roles is shown in Set 3 where I progress from schoolboy rugby player, to RAF recruit, to photographer. Of course there have been many roles in between but in creating this set, I started to think about how, to me, in my own mind, I am just me – meaning that I don’t define who I am as a human by what I am doing at that point in my life.
Family Roles
This prompted me to think of my family and my relationship to it. I have already said above that in Set 1, there is of a role reversal shown, but what roles do I have in relation to my family. Does that define who I am? I feel that the roles shown in Set 4, my roles in my family, are more defining than what job or interest I have and therefore Set 4 is my selected set for this exercise. The set spans some 40 years between the oldest and newest single image but could still be expanded further, I have more grandchildren than those shown for example. Other pictures cannot be expanded on, my grandparents are no longer with us. This exercise has made me realise the value in capturing as many photographs as I can and effectively creating a living archive – it will not always be possible to create or obtain photographs of a particular subject later and despite how mundane the images may seem at the time of capture, in exercises such as this, there is value in everything that has be captured.
Selected Set
