Photographic Memory
I go round to Gail’s to look at her collection of family photographs, and there in faded black and white is a photograph of Woolf, striding, no loping, down Darling street. It feels strange to see him caught off-guard, unposed, more real somehow. Gail tells me that photographers used to stand on the street and snap away, and then they’d stick the photographs up on the wall and you could come and buy the photograph of yourself. She remembers getting dressed up and being taken for “tea in town” at Stuttafords, or Garlicks, or Cleghorns, or Fletchers on Adderley Street, then going shopping. There is a picture of her as a little girl, proudly walking past the very same spot on Darling Street as Woolf, carrying her purchases and holding her mothers hand.
Seeing Woolf in this photograph feels like a moment of time-travel; I have passed the same spot myself so many times, it is like a glimpse into his life. He looks somewhat cross as if he has business to attend to and doesn’t want to be interrupted, and he walks with a slight hunch, his oversized jacket hanging loosely over his hands. I feel like he is hiding something, perhaps he is ever an immigrant, unbelonging, trying not to be conspicuous. Gail tells me that the Beinarts came to South Africa earlier than I thought, around 1896, and they were escaping the pogroms. This heightens my sense of Woolf as a man watching his back, hiding from potential danger.
I am reading The Emigrants by W G Sebald, and I come across this passage: “Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.” The photographs make me feel a little like this – giddy with the nearness and yet distance of my family, with these moments of almost catching them, but then feeling them recede again into the unknown.
Katy Beinart
References:
The Emigrants, W G Sebald. Harvill 1996
