EDITH AND BESSIE

Conversations with my sister recently reignighted my role as family historian. It’s been more than a few years since I’ve actively researched ancestors, known and unknown — I was surprised at how quickly, and easily, I fell back down the rabbit hole, into a wonderland of information. I was particularly delighted to discover photographs I’d never seen, of relatives I’ve never met. While I do wonder about the joy these photographs bring me, I’m curiouser (and curiouser) about the journey of these photographs, from their past, into my future.

PHOTOGRAPHIE À PARIS

September 2011: The first memory I have of consciously taking photographs, rather than just happy snaps, occurs in Paris. Although disposable, my camera had three aspect ratios; standard, wide & panorama. This was new and exciting for me, before each precious exposure I made a careful decision, and subsequent composition. The memory of my nine-year-old self standing at the base of the Eiffel Tower – in awe – lining up my shot, is almost as clear as if I held that same camera in my hands today. The results were rewarding, especially after searching Paris to find a place that would develop and print my panoramas. Perhaps the great printing cost to my parents, who were probably wondering why they ever bought me a panoramic camera to begin with, paid off.

TAKE A WALK THROUGH YOUR HOME, WITHOUT MOVING ANYTHING, WHAT PHOTOGRAPHS CAN YOU SEE?

I arrive home, ignoring the junk mail in my hand, I see three bookshelves, laden with words as well as photographs. I put my bag down, grab a glass of water from the kitchen, where any unsightly packaging, including anything with photos, is hidden behind doors. Then I sit down to take my shoes off, to my left is a black and white salon-inspired gallery wall, there's an array of framed prints and, of course, photographs:

• A postcard featuring a photograph of Ansel Adams standing on the roof of a car using a large format camera in Yosemite National Park bought while visiting the park in 2015.
• A promotional postcard from a Trent Parke exhibition at Stills Gallery — a satisfactory substitute for the limited edition print I coveted.
• A candid photo of my now husband and I taken about a year after we'd met.
• A souvenir print of a low plane over Hong Kong, taken when the airport was close to the city centre, I have no memory of this spectacle, yet I did land in that airport as a baby.
• An A4 inkjet print scanned from a 35mm negative of my favourite local architecture — the Sydney Opera House — taken as a high school student in 2006, reminding me that while a photographer’s eye can be developed, an ‘eye' is as innate as it i...
  
  SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS + SEE MORE

"...This girl, now in her early teens, had never had a photograph of herself. There was no record of her childhood, nothing which would remind her of what she used to be. There was nothing, no image, of which she could say: 'That is me.' And all this meant that there was nobody who had ever wanted her picture; she had simply not been special enough."

PHOTOGRAPH = IMAGE + VESSEL

While it may crude to divide the photograph in two, it is necessary to define the parameters of my research. I think most writing on photography (rightly) focuses on what I refer to as the image – I'm interested in studying the vessel.

After sketching this diagram I realised that it corresponds to Stephen Shore's concepts in The Nature of Photographs. He outlines three levels on which a photograph can be viewed: physical, depictive, and mental.

Although the physical aspects of viewing a photograph he describes can still apply to photographs viewed on screen, when the book was written in 2007 (the year I began my tertiary photographic studies) the focus was on printed photographs.

The term vessel was chosen to encompases all photographic containers, both hard (e.g. print) and soft copy (e.g. digital file).