Silk screen art by Andy Warhol
Sign Up | Log In
content
content
members
Create
- Write a Review
- Post a Quick Tip
- Create a List
- Ask a Question
- Create a Poll
- Create a Community
In the collection of some forty photographs for the years 1908 to 1953, fifteen of which are friends of my mother and people I do not know, there are some twenty-five photographs of my mother and her family. They provide something of a pictorial backdrop for the transition period from my grandfather's story, A.J. Cornfield, which ended in 1900 and which is found in another place and my own pioneering story for the Canadian Bahá'í community which begins in 1962 but which I take back in a preliminary account, a preamble of sorts, to 1944 the year of my birth and to 1844, in yet another place to give a perspective that goes back to the start of this Baha'i Era, BE. It is a pictorial backdrop which both reveals and conceals, which both heightens the expression of my family's life and paralyzes by fact.
These photos both pass and fail in their mnemonic function. They are both mobilization of memory in the service of my life and framers, fixers and freezers of the objects as the objects float free of their context. Here collage replaces narrative as mechanism for understanding or, perhaps more accurately, images serve as memory's only tool for a period of time largely lost and even mostly never found and certainly beyond any public history except, of course, the history I give it in my memoir, my life-narrative. These photos, as one analyst of the photographic process and its art, enable me "to negotiate" my "displacement from the past. They are nostalgic items coloured with pensiveness, each with a point that pierces our vision."
As I gaze on these photos I indulge myself in a "sentimental yearning for an irrecoverable past." These photographs are traces of moments in life, traces captured by cameras, the cameras that existed in the first half of the 20th century. The photograph has mechanically repeated for me what could never have been repeated in day-to-day existence except in some sense of familiarity of the ordinarily ordinary that everydayness which is the life of us all. The photograph has mechanically recreated something of a lost, a long-gone world in my consanguineal family.
When the first photograph in my collection was taken in 1908, to make several parenthetical but quite personal and meaningful remarks, the Baha'i Faith had been in Canada for ten years. 'Abdu'l-Baha would arrive just a few miles away four years later when His train stopped in Hamilton in 1912. These photographs preserve my family life as far back as 1908 through their simple representation of family life, my family's life. They allow me to relate to people who are now dead and environments which have been completely transformed in my time. My autobiography, thusfar, provides no photographs and these opening remarks in this chapter says a few things about why. The first photo in my collection was taken in 1907/8 when my mother was three or four, when her brother, Harold, was perhaps one and her sister, Florence, six or seven. My father at this same time was eighteen and he had just arrived from Wales in Des Moines Iowa, but no pictures of him from this period are available; in fact no pictures of my father exist before 1944. I've often wondered if this was because he belonged to a secret service organization and would never talk about it in the years I was growing up. My mother is in fifteen of the photos and all of the others in this sub-set of twenty-five photographs, are of her family. I have tried to put together something of the story of my family in the years 1900 to 1944. This is enough for now....more later if desired by readers at this site.-Ron