For the past few weeks I’ve been going through a chest of drawers containing old family photos. Anyone who follows me on Facebook knows that this has been in turn traumatising and revelatory. I’m writing about the process in my end-of-year post of course but today’s post will be a brief overview.
There are five drawers in the item of furniture and thousands of photos in the form of prints, negatives and positives. In some cases I’m taking negatives to the print shop to get proof sheets made so I can select images to have printed. In addition to regular family snapshots I’ve found some photos I took as part of my art practice in the 80s, which has been an added and pleasant bonus bec I thought all of these images had – apart from some which I’d scanned 15 years ago – lost inextricably.
Because such losses are a recurring source of sadness I resolved to put together a captioned album for my family in Japan. Despite having spent several weeks doing the sorting and selection necessary for the project, further time will be required to finish it. I have from several years ago (I think this was done in 2019) bought albums, spare leaves, and sticky corners, so all that is necessary to get the job done. As with anything worthwhile time is needed to get it right, and I promise to set up my dysfunctional laptop on my studio table so I can go through the photos one by one and write the captions in an accessible spot.
The difficulty inherent in this task is married to the motivation, on the one hand reliving the feelings the photos inspires is a source of irritation, but for the same reason I feel pain I am also compelled to complete the job.
Apart from the photo album I plan to make I will also get my framer to create a special album for the press cuttings that have been collected over the past 100 years, my grandmother Bea Dean (nee Kewish) made a little envelope to be full of clippings from newspapers and I plan to do a proper job. It’s going to be about 16 pages and will also include snapshots in black and white that mum handed down. I think that with experience I’ve garnered over the years – I worked in publishing in one form of another from 1985 to 2009 – I am uniquely placed to finish this project.
The clipping album will be something I can send around to family members to spend time with, we’re all over the place now in Queensland, Western Australia, Victoria, NSW. They can then send the album back to me, it’ll actually be more like a book with pages that you can turn. The feature of this item will be that the text is in the form of newspaper cuttings that Bea collected as well as some others that came from different family members. My great-grandfather Robert James Kewish is notable in this regard as he was a journalist and so there are some longer articles written about him. Where for most people a death will be marked by a notice in the paper paid for by a wife or son, in his case there is a whole article chronicling his life.
I feel privileged to be able to make this thing, it seems like a unique and special object that can be cherished for hundreds of years by generations.
I only hope it survives. I got some work done on several heirlooms including an 1831 Bible that belonged to someone in the family I’m not sure who, that job cost $5000 but now I have something that I can happily pass onto my children if they want it, or else give to a cousin if they want it. You can never tell what people will want to do with possessions, some might treasure them others might just want the space and so put something up for sale.
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