FAMILY HISTORY is to be my theme. This post is to be read in conjunction with the one entitled Montage: Early Stages and Planning. I will deal with the conceptual/theme here, and the technical in the other post. As is often the case, there will be some overlap in places.
Background (or: why?)
The work I have done so far has encompassed different parts of British working life (car boots, Broughton House, Launderettes, my street photographs). Tapping into this, I am also interested in family life, especially as I feel its effects nearly every day of my life. I have suffered from Anxiety and Depression all of my adult life, which has meant I have looked into many different theories as to its genesis. Some have been futile, but others have added a richness to how I come to understand my upbringing and the characters involved. The word 'characters' itself is important here, for I am interested in the narrative of people's lives, and how these can be represented in literature and the visual arts. I was only thinking the other day about how the death of Margaret Thatcher and the retirement of Alex Ferguson seem to represent an ending of something that has been a part of the backdrop to my own life in one way or another, albeit on the outskirts of day-to-day life itself.
As with most families, things have happened within mine over the last few years that have been painful, and in many respects they have happened within quick succession, allowing very little time to take stock and process. As is the British way, such things are not openly discussed in any great detail, choosing instead to "just get on with it" and do what has to be done. So I suppose the montage I will create is my way of expressing and interpreting the way I feel about my family. I think the art of photo montage is such a suitable way of carrying out this task, especially in the age of Photoshop, where layers can be used to represent the layers of memory in one's life and family history.
The Process/themes
On Mother's Day a few months ago, I urged my lovely mother to get some old pictures out so I could have a look at them and see what I could make of them in a piece of art. There were a lot of them. Crikey. All from different eras and epochs- containing a whole host of different characters- sadly a lot now deceased. It was also interesting to see the different types and negative, media and formats used over the years. It would be an interesting piece of research to find out exactly what film (even camera) was used to shoot my parents' wedding for instance.
Whilst looking through all these gems from the past, I noticed certain themes developing in my head: key relationships between family members, shared interests etc. For instance I noticed how all of my immediately family have been involved with the scouting movement in some time in their childhood/adolescence, so this made me think of how I could link these in visual form.
Father and son relationships will be of paramount importance in the creative process. I have always marvelled at the way this topic is representing in the arts as one of difficulty, expectation and poor communication. I feel I can explore this in my montage due to the fact I have pictures of my and my father from my childhood, as well as those of his father too.
Following on from these relationships, work was something that was always stressed as being important in our family, and it is interesting looking back (now both my parents are retired) at the part this played in their lives and the people they were as a result. I find it difficult to detach my father from the hard-working scaffolder he was: the feelings I felt as he arrived home from work every day- eating his tea with a pint of Stonehouse cider, off the old green tray that once belonged to my maternal grandmother. I wrote a poem in 2010 about my father's inability to switch-off from work and the damage I felt it had caused me. It might be an idea to dig this out of my creative writing file and layer the original over a scene of my father working. I find the written word in montage even more appealing than that of the typed word.
There are also some deeper- somewhat darker- issues that I am going to tackle here. I have a picture of my late brother who sadly passed away a ten years before I was born. I see this as a fundamental and inescapable part of my family history, making up part of my own legacy. I often wonder about the effects this has had on the two people that would later bring me into the world: would they have been different had their first-born lived? I think art is a perfect place to explore some of these unanswered questions of one's past (or one's parents' past).
I aim to use the tools available to me in Photoshop to fill in these blanks, so to speak. I like the fact that I will start with a blank canvas, and use these snapshots from decades ago, to ultimately "build-up" and create a new image that I can look at for years to come. After all, what is art if not a means of rewriting what is? And what is photography if not to see things in different ways?
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