Originally publishing in This Cloud May Burst (2020)
2020
A portrait of my grandmother, a haunted television, the living room of the house I grew up in. 1992. I must have taken the photo because of the height of the camera. Constructing the layout of the room in my memory, there is no other explanation for the perspective other than a child’s vantage point through a lens. I was the only child.
It’s a portrait of my grandmother, and a portrait of me. I’m on the television. I’m doubled, tripled. The flash reflected in the window, that’s me. I’m in the grain of the image, Don Delillo’s ‘universe of dots’. In my grandmother’s eyes. A photograph inside a photograph, atop a record player.
All photography is performance. All photography is séance.
The space between two membranes is where photography lives - the material and the spiritual, the lens and the memory - and it is a haunted house. As I write this, my grandmother is 85, gratefully, joyously alive. However, this house is no longer hers. My grandfather, likely sat just out of frame to the right in his chair, seat worn from use, is gone. The chair is gone. The photograph acts as a portal, like the television in Poltergeist, like the television in the photograph. Tin cans with string for the living and the dead.
I am haunted by this photograph more than any other, because it represents a fissural space, a knife-edge of a lost future and a recovered past, like when you ask the IT guy to save the files on the hard drive you dropped, but the files are in the wrong place, they turn up with different names in the wrong folder. Memory and history, data reordered. Grain and bits, pulled apart and recombined.
I am haunted by this photography because it is lost to me and yet it lives. I have been waiting to write on this image ever since I found it, excavated four years ago from a half-forgotten archive in my grandmother’s little flat full of ghosts itself. In an instant, like the flash nuclear in the window, my relationship with photography was rewritten, the story vaporised. I always told it like this, around the campfire, under the duvet - listen: I let my blood be drained by a decade of serving the vampire of the Financial Sector, a 9-5 cannibalistic capital drudge, so I didn’t start making photographs until the twilight of my 3rd decade. Art offered me a second life.
But against that, here I am inside the frame, between the membranes, performing a photograph in my ancient past, just one life. Alongside it, I found some other photographs - of the dirt, of the sky, of the lightning-strike pattern of wintered trees. This is my practice now, and then, and forever.
Those photographs of outside remain, but this one, domestic and unhomely, is gone. I cannot find it. It is no longer in the archive of the world I can access. It remains inside, but I wish I could say I held it in my hand before sharing it with you. I searched and searched and couldn’t find it. It haunts my head, so I had to write.
And so, this image is undead, the photograph and not the photograph. An unobject. It is a screenshot of an Instagram post, processed in software. What was uploaded to Instagram was a photograph of the photograph, made on my phone camera. A print of a screenshot of a digital post of a photograph of a photograph. Another ghost, stuck. For that I am thankful.
This performance, this séance. Hands held with all my selves, I gaze upon this holy relic at once pixels, halides and nothing at all with eyes closed. Roland is summoned and I speak with his voice: this capricious photograph creates my body, mortifies it too.