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My practice is driven by my response to experiences and events. On this occasion, I was moved to react to the experience of finding the biographical snapshot and the curiosity of my cognitive response to it. The enquiry that developed resulted in an epistemic experience that brought together creative thought, the conception of artefacts and the generation of new knowledge through the transformative performance of writing as action research.

The practice element of this research is a form of enquiry, a source of inspiration and a means of visualising concepts in relation to theory: the relationship between

practice and theory is flexible, each informs the other. For example the exploration of snapshot archives led me to consider what lay behind the ubiquitous, repetition that we associate with snapshot photography. This in turn led me to consider concepts of intentionality and performativity and ritual, from this I developed the notion of

Methodology

Practice: Shadows on the Wall: Rhizomatous Thoughts

4

P

RACTICE

:

S

HADOWS ON THE

W

ALL

:

R

HIZOMATOUS

T

HOUGHTS

4.1

Introduction

The story starts in 1949 or was it 52 or 53, whatever the year was that my father took a snapshot of me in my school uniform one sunny day. Some years later my mother lovingly curated the snapshot and stuck it in a family photograph album, on a page along with other snapshots of me, and interestingly, an almost identical snapshot of my son, also in school uniform.

The photographs in this album are not your typical snapshots that were glanced at once and resigned to a shoe box at the back of the wardrobe. They have been lovingly considered and memorialised. Enshrined in these photographs are the cherished memories of the photographer, the compiler and the referents; the texts carefully appended to them are a testimony to this.

Who can imagine the memories that were evoked as my mother sifted through the shoeboxes and envelopes of snapshots and negatives, as she selected and sorted a treasure of simple objects that carry within them emotions and memories? Treasured pieces of paper bearing the facsimile of people, a person, an event, a place; recalling forgotten memories and occasionally despairing as a memory failed to materialise,

Practice: Shadows on the Wall: Rhizomatous Thoughts

having faded into a pastness of forgetting. This was not just a family album but an autobiographical compilation of memories, or as Langford puts it, a work of

individual authorship, an album carefully compiled thematically, not chronologically like most photo albums, it was an anthology of my mother’s life (Langford, 2006, p.223).

What I have described here is a gallery of memories interwoven by threads of remembering and forgetting with words, names and dates and empty spaces. My mother’s memories, my memories and those of others; some memories will be vivid, others less clear, many unclear or forgotten, even with the benefit of the snapshots and the words as an aide memoire.

Family photograph albums and the practice of archiving represent an important thread in the discourse relating to the snapshot photograph and its metaphorical relationship with memory. The archiving of analogue photographs in family albums required a concerted effort on the part of the compiler to arrange and annotate an album particularly in a thematic format.

It is tempting to suggest that finding of two almost identical snapshots, even though they are separated in time by twenty years, in a family photograph album was a coincidence. But that is surely a major characteristic of snapshot photography; they are part of the collective memory that stretches back to the origins of our species. Each new generation wishes to remember the same events and occasions as those

Practice: Shadows on the Wall: Rhizomatous Thoughts

who went before; at least in the photographic era17_{. Repetition of intention is a}

primary characteristic of snapshotedness.

Examination of any family photograph album will reveal evidence of repetition of occasions, poses, places and events. Family photographs are repetitious and are not visually innovative, suggests Gillian Rose (Rose, 2010, p.11). Similarly, Chalfen writes, “all family albums are alike […] they have an overwhelming sense of

similarity and redundancy” (Chalfen, 1987, p.47). Batchen considers family albums, “cloyingly sentimental in content and repetitively uncreative as pictures” (Batchen, 2008, p.123). These authors all support the notion that the subject matter of most snapshots is repetitious and unimaginative and that family photograph albums contain remarkably similar photographs, but none really answers the question why this should be.

It is interesting that my mother should have chosen to place the two “first day at school” snapshots next to each other, thus providing evidence to support the

conjecture of Rose and others, that snapshots are repetitious and unimaginative. The snapshots my father and I took, would seem follow the perceived traditions of snapshot photography. In placing these two snapshots near to each other, I suspect, my mother’s motives were innocent of any deeper consideration than the obvious

17 _{For practical purposes the analogue, film or photographic era extended until the early}

1990’s when consumer digital cameras made an appearance. The first digital camera sold was the Fuji DS-X December 1989 in Japan (van Hall, 2015)

Practice: Shadows on the Wall: Rhizomatous Thoughts

visual coincidence and similarity of the photographs.