Wednesday 31 July 2013

Family portrait: history captured on paper

I've been in Sydney for nearly three weeks now. I visit occasionally because my family lives here. This visit was extra special though as my sister had another baby! A beautiful baby boy named Joseph. He is such a precious little bundle and his sisters love him to bits!


I'm staying at my Mum's house and she has bags of old photos and shelves full of albums. Every time I visit I find myself going through them as if seeing them for the first time. Even though I've gone through them a hundred times before, as I get older I see them differently. I understand more of the circumstances behind each photograph. I'm filled with joy at the memories and then a kind of sadness sets in. I can't really explain it. Nostalgia? Maybe I realise how old I'm getting and how far removed I am from my own childhood. I look at photos of my mother and she was such a beauty in her youth (still is!) and realise we are now the same age.
Maybe, more and more I'm seeing things for what they really are/were through the eyes of an adult; gone is the veil of youthful naivete. In some photos where we all look so happy and carefree, little did I know that this person was homeless, that person was sick, this person was abused, etc. I have photos with childhood friends and we're doing the kid thing, you know, jumping on trampolines, riding bikes, swimming at the beach, visiting the zoo. Some are married now with children of their own. Others have been in prison or fallen to substance abuse. Others who are successful and happy, or so I hope. It really gets me thinking and wondering and all sad. I can't really articulate why.
I was going through a few of them this evening with a friend. She was laughing at the gap I used to have between my two front teeth. Then she said that her family had about fifty photos total of her family. Fifty. And here I am with two full bags at my feet while I type. It reminded me how important photographs are. They capture a moment in time that will never happen again. I'll never again be that seven year old girl with a gap between her teeth. I'll probably never see some of those kids I used to play with. I'll never see certain relatives again as they've passed away.

1991 - Me (age 7) and my little brother (age 5)

With the neighbours' kids

So I come back to little baby Joseph. I have been hinting and hinting at my sister to have a family portrait done before I go back to Melbourne because Joseph is already getting bigger! I want to capture him now, with his doting teenage sisters by his side, before it's too late. Before we know it, he'll be the teenager and his sister's will have left home and we'll be saying "gee, if only we'd gotten that family portrait done all those years ago."

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