→ continued from above
I’m not entirely sure why I’m doing what I’m doing here and what I’m achieving, if anything (I call it artling). There’s some sense to it: Both my brother and I were profoundly influenced by my dad’s (unspoken) experiences (all that happened before he became a PoW – behind that door of darkness lies so much we’ll never know), but I also wanted to show us implicated (unsuccessfully, I’m afraid). How do I explain this? Every post is harder to formulate than the one before (my sentences wind on and on, brackets abound and I can’t always squeeze my texts into 700 words), as each statement, no matter how tentative, has a bundle of ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ on its shoulders.
Which is no more than allowing the bigger picture. For example: my father was glad to have been a PoW in the US. He had previously escaped from a Russian camp, and had he not, his chances of survival and relative well-being would have been greatly curtailed. He ended up in California and for much of the time worked on a farm (there is a photo I think of him with the farmers and their grown-up daughter), where he was treated very well. But but but: the Germans regularly treated their PoWs atrociously, made differences based on their ruthless hierarchy of nationalities and races. Often enough they killed captured soldiers outright, in high numbers. And where should I even start on the subject of forced labour? I’m constantly trying to weigh up things that can’t be, not in any way at all. And how can I set myself apart from this? I’m not even thinking about whether guilt can be inherited, but much more simply trying to consider how we as a post-war-generation might be implicated, and on the most basic level conceding this: we can’t say what we would have done had we lived in that time. No amount of retrospective wishing that I’d had the courage of a Sophie Scholl gets me anywhere.
I’m afraid I may have gotten a bit lost in this post. Brain and heart are in knots; the gap between what I’m exploring, and my ability to give it shape through writing and artling seems huge just now. Still: I’m keen to show you more work. One crochet piece was finished a while ago, but I’m unsure how best to photograph it. And a couple of pieces-in-process involving stitching with hair and yarns lie in wait – fingers not so nimble just now.
A big thank you to Artists Talking blogger friend Jean McEwan, whose work with family photographs has long inspired me, and who recommended some essential reading.
This resonated strongly, from Annette Kuhn’s: Photography and cultural memory: a methodological exploration: “Memory work is rather like peeling away the layers of an onion that has no core: each level of analysis, while adding more knowledge, greater understanding, also generates further questions. Analysis, as Freud might have it, can be interminable.” (p. 290) in the end it’s mostly analysis of self, isn’t it?
