HEALTH PLUSPhotographs can teach children about all sorts . . . including themselves, writes Marie Murray
CHILDREN LOVE family photographs. Especially intriguing to the child's eye are the photographs of their parents when they were children. These photographs introduce children to extraordinary concepts: of time, of space, of relationships, of continuity and of change. As philosopher Roland Barthes identifies, photographs pose a powerful question about the self, the passage of time and the changes wrought by its passing.
Photographs show the similarities and differences across the generations. They highlight the irretrievability of the past, the inevitability of the future and the orderly, perfect seasonality that is inherent in nature in all her simplicity and complexity from one generation to the next.
Photographs capture children's parents in their childhoods, with their own parents, with the child's grandparents when they were young. Photographs show children the adults in their world when they were small: one's mother as a little girl, one's father as a boy, their toys, their childhood faces smiling.
They record places that have changed, activities that may no longer occur and ordinary, everyday implements that may no longer be in use. They show rural activities that are unfamiliar to the urban child or urban life to the child for whom the countryside is home.
Photographs show children the homes their parents lived in and give them glimpses into the lives their parents led. They show them fashions that seem strange, possessions that look odd, or objects that have survived the past and now are part of their own homes. Sometimes they show abandoned bikes, big dolls' prams, rugs on the grass and the scattering of the day's toys around the garden on a sunny day. There are school photographs, children in uniform, ranked by height and size for this moment in their collective lives.
There are photographs of family pets, beloved and lively, posing for their own records of their time amongst the clan. Parents recall their names, the love they had for them, their sorrow when they died.
Some photographs show groups of people smiling out, not conscious when the photograph was taken what curiosity they would stir in years to come in those who would find them and wonder who they were.
Sometimes a single photograph prompts a parent into a narrative of the day, pointing to who was there, why they were together, what made it special, how it ended and where the occupants of that photograph are today. Children love photographs of their parents' wedding, the mystery of their own existence dependent on that day.
Photographs give reality to people who are dead: people children never met who were significant in their parents lives and in the history of their family.
They show people who had tragic accidents, people taken ill, adventurers who lost their way, those who died in youth, those whose memories have been idealised with time or those about whom the family does not speak too much.
Sometimes children find what must be pictures of themselves yet cannot be, for they are in locations that they do not know, wearing clothes they never owned, holding toys that don't belong to them in sepia-toned places or in that strange monochromatic world their parents occupied. How strange to find a replica of oneself: images and people juxtaposed, similar in appearance, connected by kinship, separated by time.
Some photographs record the social history of a time, the cattle mart, the ploughing championships, fair day, the main street in a country town, the city streets before prosperity, religious ceremonies, public holidays, parades, politicians of a former age, "celebrities" of their day.
Abundant or sparse, chronological or erratic, event-bound or randomly taken, photographs are unique records of our lives. They capture moments that make up our memories and make memories of times we really don't recall. Photographs offer memories to our later selves of our former selves that are different to other forms of remembrance that are available to us.
As modern technology erases imperfection, alters what we wish to enhance and deletes what we do not wish to preserve, selective digital photography may deprive us of the ordinary, the everyday, the unexpected, the imperfect, the treasure chest of memories through which children can find their parents in the past, the past itself, the history of their family and the first records of themselves.
It is good for children to record the ordinary in their lives and a child who is given the gift of a camera is a child given the past, the present and the future all in one.
mmurray@irish-times.ie
Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist