Photographic memory

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Perhaps the universal appeal of old photographs lies in their property of time travel. It is a pleasure we have deeply abandoned ourselves to during the pandemic - suspended in time, seemingly disconnected from the future, maybe even hard-core anti nostalgists like me fear anachronism a little less, sorting unlimited digital and limited physical images of the past, sharing them in wonder.

This business has offered definitive proof of something that is otherwise a matter resentful innuendo - the one person in the family or friends group who is the chief archivist, who seems to have the complete photographic record - but how?

How have they come to be custodians of inter-generational photos - touring grandparents, graduating aunts and uncles, baby parents? Maybe they are scrupulous collectors and duplicators of photos. Maybe they are a little unscrupulous also - like asking a confused elder if they may keep a photo. There may also be some deft theft involved, done while everyone else was in the living room drinking and fighting about, the unrecorded and hence, open to interpretation yaniki accusation, past. Please don't narrow your eyes while asking how I know these things. Isn't this how museums have been made worldwide?

The question is why do some people hoard pictures? Some do it from a comfortable sense of ownership of a certain history, a sure sense their past was the right kind of time. Some do it for the opposite reason. Never having felt a sure sense of acceptance into any folds, an important character in any story, they create a closeted sense of belonging through this fidelity and record.

Perhaps photographs are a history of belonging and not belonging, having and not having. Those who have photographs of several generations, gravely posed in traditional dress, often also have property going back generations, the means to photograph, and a place to keep them in for decades. My family photos are few and scattered, mirroring a history of migrations, at times forced, at times fuelled by desire, love marriages and well, love divorces. Both my maternal grandparents were public figures, so sometimes we see photos in other people's archives.

In a fast motion, history photos go from self-consciously posed, and elaborately staged in studios, to an array of candid thumbnails, contact sheets of picnics, honeymoons, holidays, bouffants, bell bottoms, weddings, to elaborately staged Instagram candour; from sepia to colour to moonlight black and white filter, from scarce to plenty. Whole histories of tech enthusiasts and photography enthusiasts and middle-class leisure are tucked away in these albums. Even in plenty there is always a lack. I have not a single print, though hundreds of digital images of my niece, a 21st century baby. Sometimes you realise you have an incommensurate handful of photos of someone you loved hugely, proof also, love can be plentiful, yet uneasy. Sometimes you have no pictures of a marvellous day because you were all too absorbed in its marvels to take pictures.

Old photos bring new eyes - you realise, commonly, you were actually beautiful, though neither you, nor anybody else, thought so then.. You realise your grandparents were once young and feel dissonance. The picture of your teenaged parent, fills you with piercing tenderness for their downy upper lip, their clumsy, tentative youth. You understand then the tenderness they must have felt for you. Perhaps you get a chance to feel it for yourself.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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