There’s something uncanny about looking at these photos of my dad as a prisoner of war. That they survived, that my father chose to hang on to them, put them in his album, although it’s quite in character too: this was part of his life after all, and the only period of which no images exist is the time when he was fighting. This gap coincides with the gap in what he could communicate to his family. A chasm really, which neither words nor images could bridge.
I’ve made copies of these formally posed photographs: of my dad alone; of my dad next to another very young-looking soldier; even one of a group of PoWs, of various ages (why photographs were taken of pairs&groups is unclear to me). My dad never looks at the camera. For the individual photo he sits half-turned, as you would for a passport photo, with left ear visible. In the group-photo (two kneeling PoWs in the front-row, one of whom is my dad, the others standing) his gaze is unfocused, seemingly turned inside. In the paired photo he sits a little behind the second PoW (about whom I know nothing), their bodies touching, and looks to the right of the camera, with slightly open mouth. Everything I try to glean from these details, beyond the photographs’ factual context, is contingent on what I think I know about my father.
All three were made into small Prisoner of War Post Cards, marked as such on the reverse side, where the person could note the address of a relative, nothing else. Each prisoner must have been given several as my dad had some to take home. They served multiple purposes – registration, notification, linking into the world – as laid out in the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, 1929. I’ve always been baffled (and grateful) by the fact that there are rules®ulations pertaining to warfare which to me seems something utterly beyond any (comprehensible) bounds.
I am working with the photograph which shows him with the other soldier. Strangely it contains no clear indication that they are PoWs: the letters P and W were marked on the uniforms’ opposite sleeves and trouser legs and are invisible here.
Let me share three very simple interventions, each of which throws up different questions:
First I placed a loosely crocheted hair-web on the photo. I find the effect both beautiful and moving, which makes me suspicious. Truth is, I almost can’t tear my eyes off these two pale faces under those ink-black loops. The photo is b/w (the original has a hint of sepia) which seems to put the figures at a further remove, make them stranger, less real. Silent movie stars. It’s almost as if my father had fallen further into the past. To a safe(r) distance.
Next I stitched into a sepia-toned copy with a fine mohair/silk yarn, setting its soft&fuzzy quality against the image’s consummately masculine context. In effect I’ve coated/covered/camouflaged those unknowable faces – an act both protective&piercing, delicate&damaging. Will do the same with hair next.
Last I rolled up a photo and connected two edges with a piece of crochet. It doesn’t quite work as an object, but I’m interested in the views through the camera-lens, with distorted proportions.
Mostly I’m feeling my way here. Photography isn’t my medium and I don’t know enough about its conventions – time to catch up. And I haven’t experimented for ages – I like it! Speculation and crochet don’t go together easily, and now that I am kind of artling with these photographs I wonder if it’s partly because it allows me to breathe while considering hard-to-bear subjects.
I worry that these pieces speak to me and me alone. The knowledge I have of history sharpens my gaze, personal identification tempers it. I’m also prone to conflicting superstitious impulses: trying to check sentimental urges I research the forms German warfare took (no breathing). But then I delete my recordings of Channel4‘s Hitler’s Rise. The Colour Films, because I can’t bear how voice&venom infiltrate my living-room, leave toxic traces… At the same time I’m overcome by a childlike notion that I can, as if by magic, retrospectively scoop my father out from all of ‘it’. I want to save him! If I’ve inherited a part of the big dark cloud that hung above and occasionally enveloped him, it means I want to save myself too.
