Christina MaxwellPhoto Essay: Vintage Family Photograph4 May 2014

The Image of a Child

“Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us to understand anything. The simple fact of “rendering” a reality doesn’t tell us much about that reality. […] The “reality” of the world is not in its images, but in its functions. Functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand.” – Susan Sontag, “Photography” (p. 13)

Childhood memories are oftentimes embedded in our minds and the stories told by

others, but they are played out and recalled through the context surrounding photographs. While

I am as guilty as the average person, snapping endless photos from my iPhone for my own

personal interest, those photos don’t hold the same significance that a photograph printed on

Kodak or Fuji paper does. Possessing a printed photo, one that wasn’t printed from my own

home printer via a digital camera, but one that was taken from my mother’s Rangefinder, one

that I anticipated to see and that meant waiting anxiously at the film processing clinic located

inside the local K-Mart after school until the prints were finished and the cashier rang us up

represented a time when memories were all that I had and oftentimes, all that I looked forward

to.

Now that I am a little bit older and a bit wiser as I hold onto those undeveloped 35mm

film rolls that I found in a green storage tote on the left side of my closet that carry those

evidence makers of my trip to Florida, I can only wonder if I will recall the truth in those

photographs, or will I, as Victor Burgin suspects many of us do, focus less on the critical aspects

of the photos, and only concern myself with the fact that photographs are “provided free of

charge […] offer[ing] themselves gratuitously” (Burgin 130), meaning possessing photos of

particular events or moments in our lives are to be expected, almost required in our lives. Just

having control of the photos means more than what the photos actually depict. As we look at the

trajectory of photography, stakeholders in the late 1800’s such as Dominique Francois Arago

believed photos represented the truth as “faithful pictorial records” (Trachtenberg 17) and Edgar

Allen Poe believed photography was more truthful than language. Moving into the late 1900s,

photography theorists began to question the authenticity of photographs and viewing

photographs as not necessarily the truth. Annette Kuhn in “Remembrance: The Child I Never

Was” believes photographs tell us more about today, than yesterday. If that is the case, that

images create these unfocused, perhaps untruthful conflicting memories then perhaps we should

look back at childhood or family photographs and focus more on the past and present

surroundings of said photographs.

I’d like to tell you a story about a photograph of a young girl, three and half years old:

hair and makeup fully set, dressed to the little girl nines. Her lightly curled hair is placed in a

ponytail atop her head, tighten by a red and white hair clips which perfectly matches with her red

and white valor dress. She sits in front of a faux Christmas tree, her hands placed in her lap as an

almost act of politeness. I would like to tell you the young girl in the photo is me, and it in fact is

me, but I almost have a difficult time believing it is me. At such a young age, I have no distinct

memories of the location of where this portrait was taken, although I can deduct by the

placement (and by the fact that I’ve never lived in a house with a fireplace) that I am in a portrait

studio, a fanciful, imaginative setting where parents go to have grade-A photos of their children

that they eventually place throughout the hallways in their homes, display on their office desks

and keep tucked away in their wallets when asked if they have any photos of their children.

There are not that many differences to this photo then the one Annette Kuhn reveals in

“Remembrance.” Embedded in her discussion of misplaced memories, we see a photograph of a

well-dressed six-year old girl sitting on a chair focusing all of her attention on a small parakeet

perched inside the palm of her hand. Kuhn is able to give this photograph some much needed

context, as she details what we cannot see: the young girl’s undergarments, the confusion of the

exact location of the photo. But does a viewer need to know bits of that perhaps pertinent

information? What Kuhn is simply doing is constructing meaning around the time frame from

when this photograph was taken. I could tell you I still own the dress in this photo, although lost

in an attic full of other forgotten childhood things. Is it true or not true? Perhaps I’ve confused

that dress with another red dress I wore when I was eight-years old to my cousin’s birthday

party, photos found in the same baby book. These memories are a piece of the puzzle, the way to

make complete meaning of the photograph. But who is that information for, for the individual or

for the surrounding society? Perhaps these estimations are placed within the family—my family.

The confusion continues. The date on the back of this 2x3 print reads “December 12, 1992.” The

print my father has reads “December 6, 1992.” Same picture, different date.

Kuhn struggled with the same recollection, as her mother placed her own memories in the

photo, replacing one location for another, as “this little dispute between a mother and daughter

points not only to contingency of memories not attached to, but questioned by an image, but also

to a scenario of power relations within the family” (397).

Her family issues were embroiled deep in this photograph. As Kuhn writes, photographs

are evidence (“material [up] for interpretation – evidence, in that sense: to be solved, like a riddle

[…] like clues left behind at the scene of a crime”) but at the same time, the photographs do not

mirror real life (Kuhn 395). Like Errol Morris, I must wonder why images and reality find

themselves so far apart when we, the subjects of these photographs, spend a considerable amount

of time away from said photographs, which I will discuss in depth later.

The question I must pose is do, or should photos construct our reality. Realist theorists, as

Martin Lister discusses believes images (photographs) “short-circuits” the intentionally and

meaning the photographer was ultimately going for (Lister 219). This in many ways, is a staged

photograph—not as staged as the photo fakery Morris discusses with the North Dakota cows at

Capitol, but none the less the emphasis is more on this search of idealism. The average day as my

three-year old self did not consist of me waking up early, getting my hair curled, having my

mother place a coat of light mascara on my eyes. Instead, I wore t-shirts of my favorite cartoon

characters, pulled the bangs away from my face, and looked more like a rug rat than a lite

pageant princess.

My childhood wasn’t any Greek tragedy, in fact, just the opposite. I had a normal

childhood surrounded by love from my mother, father and other members of the family who

would spend a significant amount of time around me growing up (grandmother, grandfather,

aunts, uncles, cousins). I smiled, I laughed, and yes, at times I shouted and cried. As a child, I did

alright.

Photographs as Morris mentions, project out only what we want others to know, all the

while concealing the “hidden truths” we don’t want others to know. (Morris 164). Perhaps my

mother was searching for idealism when she made this appointment at the Sears portrait studio.

To hide the truth that a daughter that looks so perfect would ever scream, yell or take a tantrum.

But is our idealism that farfetched from reality? As Henry Peach Robinsson muses, a picture

cannot be considered art without a hint of “what is real and true” (Trachtenberg 93) ---

comparing art and photography is a slippery slope, but what I am referring to is no matter how

staged a photo may be, we must give credence to authenticity found in a child’s eyes, one we can

idealistically tap into with the constructing knowledge of our surrounding society.

This photo for me became synonymous with my childhood. I was almost haunted by this

photograph because everywhere I went: to my grandmother’s, my grandfather’s house he shared

with his third wife, when I’d open up my father’s wallet to steal one of his two-dollar bills that I

always believed were fake, I’d see this image. During my elementary school years, my fifth

grade teacher assigned our class to bring in childhood photographs. When I displayed this

particular photo of me, students remarked that I looked like JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year old

beauty queen pageant that was murdered in her Colorado home. I was almost embarrassed by

that remark, then I began to see myself in her stills that I’d see on the nightly news. I was,

without realizing, making connections to all of the other images outside of my life that came

before me or have no connect with: thinking of past (“nostalgic”), present (“boring”) and future

(“simply fightening”) (Hall 105).

Kuhn says photographs are “prompt[s]” or a “pre-text” for recollection: In terms of

semiotics, a 22-year old photograph is a paratext, a piece of evidence of my childhood that stands

from the outside and “comments on […] or alters the meaning” (Hall 128). I believe looking

back at a photograph of myself with my natural bright blonde hair, knowing that just in a few

short years my hair would turn darker creates not only a structure for my childhood but provides

steps leading to and from my past. By making these associations and knowing these small details

I believe changes the meaning of this photograph. Perhaps, not for others, of course.

I think all vintage photographs: of myself, of Kuhn, is an instance of paratext into our

future. It is the intextuality that Lister speaks of that allows us to learn to understand a photo’s

context. As he writes, an image “is not freestanding and autonomous” even when separated from

others, the meaning becomes clear when cross referenced between other images, strengthening

my belief that photographs are never isolated, even the one of myself: I think of the text on the

back of the print, the duplicates, the surrounding photos, the significance of the baby photo

books and the surrounding borders and how they all play a role (222).

A still photograph is a “privileged moment,” a piece of material we (viewer of the image,

subject of the image) can refer back to over and over again. To piggyback off of the paratext,

oftentimes it is better to not look at photographs for a long amount of time to create that outside’s

perspective, one that will again, alter the meaning. The further one is away from a photograph,

the more we can embrace Kuhn’s belief that a photograph “point[ing] you away from itself” and

focuses more on the past, present and future contexts of the image.

The time spent away from the photograph, the differences in the settings we see photos

changes the way we interpret what we see, as Hall describes in the viewer/image semiotic theory.

The meaning made as I see myself here and the way Kuhn sees the photograph of herself or the

way her mother views the visual is left up to the viewer, as they make the meaning based on their

past interpretations, or “constant negotiations [that] shift between viewer and image.” (92).

I can’t tell you much about the camera this photograph was taken on. What I have in my

possession, like others, is a print. This image is made on AGFA paper, a Belgian company that

no longer manufactures older paper. When I place the paper-thin material in my hands, I

somehow feel the heaviness and the weight this image carries around, unlike those digital

pictures I continuously snap on my iPhone, which now I can take in Burst Mode and never miss

a minute of my subject in motion.

The photographic medium tends to pit photographs and digital images against each other,

and in discussing the materiality of this studio print, it brings me back to the debate Roland

Barthes poses between the mechanical truth and aforementioned production of an image to the

“constructed” characteristics, codes and context that play a role in how an image is viewed. I

believe that plays a role in how I view this image—within the frames of knowing who is in the

image and through the discovery of finding why I was staged in such a way as a child.

Ultimately, I connect this piece with cultural theory and the defining approach that there

is nothing “personal or private about either family photographs or the memories they evoke”

(Kuhn 397). The memories of where I’ve seen that red dress before, the comparisons to Ramsey,

the locations I’ve seen this picture in time and time again cannot be found in the image itself, but

instead that image works as a piece of the puzzle, one that transcends the social context of

making meaning and memory. No matter how hard we try, photographs introduce and sustain a

conflict of nature, “a site of conflicting memories” (397) that maintain our grasp and connects

the insistences of family memories and photography.

Works Cited

Burgin, Victor. “Looking at Photographs.” Screen Education 24. (1977): 17-24. Print.

Hall, Sean. This Means This This Means That. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2012. Print.

Lister, Martin, ed. The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. Print.

Kuhn, Annette. “Remembrance The Child I Never Was.” The Photographer Reader (1991,

2003): 395-401. Print.

Morris, Errol. Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography). New York:

The Penguin Press, 2011. Print.

Sontag, Susan. “Photography.” The New York Review of Books. Web. 18. Oct 1973.

Trachtenberg, Alan, ed. Classic Essays on Photography. Sedgwick: Leete’s Island Books, 1980.

Print.