Shakes of the Kaleidoscope
Shakes of the Kaleidoscope: family, photography and the fragmentation of memory
Introduction
The last few years have found me helping care for my mother and aunt, both ‘living with dementia,’ as their mother did before them. My mother, like my late father, was a photographer. The old family album is a wonderful archive, but, aptly enough, it has fallen to pieces over the decades. There are blank pages, dried up pieces of tape, prints jumbled and identities forgotten. Other pictures resurfaced after years in the attic, and began to take turns on the mantelpiece like an ever-changing museum of our lives.
It was a tale I wanted to share. I asked myself the question: how do you tell a story about dementia when family members are in the thick of it?
Using a circular process combining intuitive photography and analytical reflection, I identified two broad approaches to telling such a story. One approach is to attempt a linear narrative. To pin things down before they are forgotten, create a prompt to family storytelling; to impose order on chaos, a chronology when time gets out of joint. To re-tell old stories, cement family legend. To anticipate the losses to come and set out a version of the story that you think your future self will want to hear.
Another approach is to enter that world of forgetting . Have beginnings, middles and endings, but as Jean-Luc Godard said, not necessarily in that order (Tynan 1966:24). Shuffle time like a pack of cards, with blanks and gaps and repetition. Explore darkness with metaphor, unmoor yourself from reality. Express as best you can the unravelling of identity that begins as the autobiographical memory falters.
In keeping with the first approach, I started to put the family archival prints in some kind of order, to tell a version of my mother’s story before it was forgotten. I coupled these with images – snapshots and portraits - that I have made in my mother’s house, up to and beyond the death of my aunt last year. These two strands formed a timeline.
However, I did not feel this approach was adequate, on its own. It was too neat, too ordered, and I needed to acknowledge that dementia is far from neat and ordered. Even if you discounted the forgetting, the increasing cognitive chaos needed its part in the story, as did my own swirling emotions.
So I also continued with the third strand: woodland images that I make to process my feelings about the present and future. They serve as a metaphor for memory and forgetting, tangled root and branch structures expressing ideas about the twin legacies of dementia and photography in my family, and what it all means for me.
The family archive
In Penelope’ Lively’s novel about the vexed task of the biographer, According to Mark, she writes,
“We all know, with reference to our own lives, the curious ways in which truth can be not so much distorted as multi-faceted. Give the kaleidoscope a shake and a different picture forms. Each of us sees through a glass darkly, impeded not just by the frailties of memory but by our own convictions.”
Looking at the family archive had been challenging. I was at a loss to know what story to construct with it. An archive can tell any story you want or need it to in a given moment – Poliakoff’s play Shooting the Past (1998) had shown me that. But I couldn’t settle on one single narrative, and knew I couldn’t tell all the stories at once.
Lively’s kaleidoscope metaphor was liberating. Suddenly I could accept the incompleteness, the partiality of whichever version of the story I chose; I did not have to try to tell the whole truth.
The task was an emotional challenge too, because the grief at my father’s sudden death and my mother’s slow-motion disintegration was raw. Looking back at these prints from the sixties and seventies, my parents’ young faces, although wonderful on one hand, also filled me with sadness, and something else too. Poliakoff encapsulates it:
“I just have to say one thing to make all these pictures absolutely electrifying…these people, all these people – are about to be hit by the most terrible change. Their whole lives turned upside down…And they have no idea.”
Here was real-life dramatic irony. My parents in those pictures have no idea what’s ahead – but looking at the album, I know exactly what is going to happen. Not least, that my photographer mother, six decades later, would develop a visual dementia that would rob her of the ability to use a camera or to understand a picture, that would turn family photos on the wall into crowds of threatening strangers, and that, ultimately, would steal her sight and her memory of all these people.
It was devastating. But I could choose my story. I crystallised the narrative I wanted to tell by writing, and by sticking scans and copies on a blank wall. I added in my documentary photographs too. Arranging and rearranging the prints, shaking the kaleidoscope, different stories appeared. And one day, what I saw on the wall was not primarily loss, but love.
However, I wasn’t there yet. The plain scans of the archive felt too clinical. I might have found a narrative in my head, but the prints themselves felt unconnected to the emotions I experienced, unconnected to my feelings about the passage of lives. For this reason, I made the physical form of the archive part of the narrative too, alluding to the passing of time and the fallibility of the record. I chose the blemished, yellowed prints to scan; I did not clean them up. With re-photography, I sought to emphasise the prints’ existence as physical artefacts from the past.
I also photographed the damaged, empty pages of the disintegrating family album. I brought branches and sprigs to cast tree shadows across the paper, providing a visual link with my documentary and woodland images. I hoped to express ideas about connectedness, of legacies, and everything that is passed on down the generations.
This approach, I felt, made the old photographs belong to me too: that I was not just plundering my parents’ archive but somehow collaborating with my mother and my late father. It is part of what puts me and my story in the book. And it allows for that blend of linear and disrupted chronologies; the safety of a timeline, a guide rope to grasp as I explored the telescopic, kaleidoscopic, chaotic scenery inside the brain.
Observational images
Rather than looking at the past through the lens of present knowledge, this strand of images looks at the present through the lens of my imagined future. These photographs are in part “nostalgia-in-prospect” (Kuhn 1995: 23). I was not exactly trying to freeze moments in time, but I was unquestionably using photographs to “make memories, and …make use of the stories they generate.” (1995:158)
For example, in situations like these, there can be a tendency to focus on the fear and the sadness rather than the moments of joy and connection that remain. Fear and sadness need to be acknowledged of course, but I wanted to beware of cognitive biases when remembering this time. Photographing the good moments, I thought, would help me set down a version of the story that future Kate might be glad to remember. The image “Sisters” is a case in point: it captures a moment of tenderness between the two sisters at a time when each was anxious for the other’s wellbeing, and the dynamic between them was not always easy.
That image became a key part of their story. Prints were shown in various exhibitions, the most important display being in their own home, a touchstone for the relationship, a reminder of the care and affection between them, symbolic of their unbreakable sisterly bond.
Of course, I am aware of the power held by me in this situation. It’s plausible to think that over time, the photographs I make and share will come to define my story, or my version of it. Family history is told by the curators of the album (Kuhn). It’s partial. However collaborative the approach, one must acknowledge where the power lies, especially where vulnerable participants are involved.
Knowing that photographs are as much about the photographer as well as the photographed, I had to accept that this work is about my mother, and also about me; it is about the meanings I seek in those interactions and the sense of identity that forging and remembering these moments confers upon me.
Acknowledging this does not absolve me of responsibility: it is inescapable fact that in telling your own story you intrude on somebody else’s too. For this reason, I prioritise my mother’s autonomy, privacy and dignity. There are many images I do not make. Fewer and fewer as time goes on, in fact. I have taken comparatively few images of my mother in the last year or so; the story this is telling often sits uncomfortably now. In addition, I feel that my duty in such a situation is care, not photography. For a long time, such photography was a part of the care; indeed, both the sisters enjoyed it. Those days are going, if not quite gone; if I have a spare hand, it needs to be holding my mother’s, not operating a camera.
Woodland images
I find I am turning more towards the metaphorical as a device for exploring and expressing emotion. Juxtaposed with the documentary images, these will give future Kate a clue to her thoughts during these difficult years, blending the linearity of the first approach with the amorphousness of the second.
My woodland photography began as my respite, and so it remains. I soon realised it was more than that, however: these images were ‘mindscapes’ as much as landscapes (Campany 2022). I am drawn to the uncanny fractals of the trees as a way of playing with fears while simultaneously keeping them at bay. They are a metaphor for memory and forgetting, for the grasping at reality even as it slips away, for the entanglement of dementia and the unravelling of the self. There is little sky in these woodland images; there are no paths, no ways out, one is forever drawn deeper into the woods. At the same time, the twisted branches mirror the tangling pathways and neurons in the brain.
These images are not just about the loss of autobiographical memory. My mother cannot navigate her way around the house where she has lived for over 30 years. Before her eyes, the rooms flip, reverse, bend. Every shadow becomes a perilous void. Family photos morph into intruding hordes, and have been taken down from the walls.
My abstract woodland images are an attempt to understand and recreate the defamiliarisation my mother experiences in her environment. I printed original, undistorted images on textured paper, and reflected them, lit by the afternoon sun or an LED, in bendy mirror sheeting stuck to the wall, with undulations, scratches, dirt marks and spots. These reflections gave me different sorts of distortions depending on the lens used and minute shifts in camera position. The images accord with what my mother was – until recently – able to describe about her visuo-spatial processing.
The distortions in these images appeared before my lens as I moved my camera. One image came about shortly after an unnerving experience with my mother at the top of a department store escalator. When, afterwards, I read a description of a visual dementia in Nicci Gerrard’s What Dementia Teaches Us About Love, I was taken aback at the similarity.
“Things seem upside down: you can’t locate objects, can’t find the door. Often people feel that they are standing at an angle. Or they see a small puddle and think it’s a hole. Or, standing at the top of an escalator, they stare down at a gushing waterfall.”
Metaphors for memory and the disintegration of identity, as well as explorations and explanations of a peculiar disorientation, this set of images is my attempt to let go of order and chronology, and to enter that world of darkness and forgetting.
The final form: one shake of the kaleidoscope
Throughout the process I felt a tension between the two approaches I outlined at the beginning – how to strike the balance I wanted between steady linear storytelling, a fixer for autobiographical memory, and the time-shifting jumble of the failing memory and unravelling of identity.
A strict chronological approach alone would tell the story too neatly; a disrupted approach ran the risk of leaving no story at all. Sequencing the images for the book meant that this dilemma had to be resolved.
Intellectually, I saw the case for disrupting the chronological sequence of the archival and documentary images. It would echo the time-shifts of memory that take place with dementia, and mirror the temporal distortion that occurs in the dementing brain. It might make the sequence less predictable, and more interesting; it would play to the kaleidoscope metaphor.
Emotionally, however, I wanted to keep a grasp on the story that is slipping away with each new stage of my mother’s illness. I couldn’t bear to give up on chronology just yet.
I had engaged Emily Macauley at Stanley James Press to design, print and hand-bind the book. She saw straight to the heart of my dilemma, understanding with tremendous empathy my contradictory desires to hold onto a fading story while simultaneously conveying the slipperiness of the narrative.
Our discussions resulted in a hybrid between these two approaches, and a weaving together of the three strands of images I had created.
The book is presented in a folder such as you might find in a museum archive- my attempt at the conservation of memories. It’s also a nod to my mother’s first job back in the 1960s as a museum photographer at the Ashmolean in Oxford, a time and a job that now more than ever, with the winding back of time, seems central to her identity.
Inside, the archive and documentary images appear in broadly chronological order, but with disruptions. There’s the odd flashback or forward, there is embossed ‘missing content,’ and hidden memories in fold-out pages.
I decided to punctuate this narrative with dark and metaphorical images to allow the viewer, for a few moments at a time – to become absorbed in that world of forgetting and confusion. For these interstitial pages I chose both the naturalistic and the abstract woodland imagery, as well as images of the empty pages of the old album. Coming at intervals, they disrupt the narrative, hint at what is to come, take the viewer out of the chronological story.
And if I worry that the balance isn’t right, or that things have changed since I made the book, or that I would make it differently if I made it now, then I go back to the liberating metaphor of the kaleidoscope. My book is not pretending to be the whole truth. It is a portrait of and tribute to my mother, then and now; it’s also about me, and the memories that make up my own identity. The truth may not be distorted, but it is indeed multi-faceted; our view of it conditioned both by our flawed memories, our convictions, experiences and our present situations.
I had begun Kaleidoscope as part of my Photography MA, developing and publishing it over the following year. It always was an autobiographical project, and the autobiography continues, with the death of my aunt and the ever shrinking world of my mother dominating my life. Photography remains a compulsion in this chapter of the story, though my subject matter is shifting.
Nicci Gerrard writes,
“The art that attempts not simply to observe and describe but to inhabit that desolate place of self-loss edges us towards that darkness and silence and absence and becomes like an emotional modernism in which there is no central narrator, no coherent story, where things are fractured and the safe ground slides away beneath our feet. Exploring the experience of dementia and the loss of memory can bring about a powerful and vertiginously unsettling way of thinking about time, place and identity, where the notion of a stable reality and a single self breaks apart.”
I am, however, not ready to take it this far. I can countenance the idea of multiple, shifting, kaleidoscopic stories. I can punctuate them with images that seek to understand or imagine that ‘desolate place’ that Gerrard describes. But I am not yet ready to abandon the notion of the self, of autobiography, of identity.
It may be that the very act of photography, rather than my subject matter, is what allows me to hold on to these notions. When I first returned to photography as an adult, it felt like a homecoming of sorts. Photography was integral to my childhood memories, the darkroom a womb-like safe place. It is possible that I have adopted it as a way of holding on to my parents’ legacy, and thus to my own sense of identity.
Time and my genetic destiny might yet take me to that desolate place, but I plan to hold onto those notions of time, place, identity and autobiography while I still can. So, though I find the images harder and harder to look at, I’ve not yet given up on photographing my mother and her house, not given up on the idea of a record of a family history, kaleidoscopic though it may be.
July 2024
This article is based on a paper I gave at the Vestiges of Memory symposium at UCA Canterbury in July 2024
References
CAMPANY, David. 2022. Available at: https://www.davidcampany.com/helen-sear-inside-the-view/ [accessed 19 November 2022].
GERRARD, Nicki. 2020. What Dementia Teaches Us About Love. London: Penguin Random House.
KUHN, Annette. 1995. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso.
LIVELY, Penelope. 2011. According to Mark. London: Penguin Classics.
POLIAKOFF, Stephen. 1998. Shooting the Past. London: Methuen.
TYNAN, Kenneth. 1966. ‘Verdict on Cannes.’ The Observer Weekend Review. 22 May.