Where do I start? I’m following so many strands now that identifying one for a post is hard. In the end though the process of editing my proliferating texts helps to temporarily disentangle the mass of knotted threads that hang from my hands. Very tired time too, body&brain. When I can’t even manage a little crochet my arms become strangers, the day stays incomplete.
Blessed be my iPad… Have been doing bits of what I call heavy-heart research – trailing photos on-line of WWII child-soldiers and partisans aged 12/13/14/15, compared to whom my dad, who entered war at 17, seems like an old soul. Have also looked at photos of PoWs, from all sides. Can see why my dad considered himself lucky. Started reading Marianne Hirsch‘s Family Frames, peeked into Gabriele Schwarz’s Haunting Legacies, listened to Michael Goldfarb remembering Alice Herz-Sommer, to a programme about the memory of genocide in Rwanda, to another on trauma transmitted through generations and conflict-resolution, one about how Long March is recalled in China, saw pix on the tele of scarily masked men organising into militias on Krim, etc etc. Everything seems to connect.
Coming back to the photos I’m working with, their shifting meaning, and their passage to me: their entwined personal&official nature. They are documentary evidence that my dad was a PoW in the US, and declare a change of status and location: from soldier of the Wehrmacht to prisoner-of-war of an allied state (a kind of passage too). I found them in a photo-album at my mom’s, where my dad assembled them after his return to civilian life, and re-photographed them. Now I’m looking at my copies here, decades after the fact, and showing you fragmented views. Questions about borderlines beset me wherever I turn. In some ways I’ve become, or rather, declared myself their owner. Am I also their care-taker if I chose to work with them? All the while my dad slips in and out of view.
The lack of presence I perceive in his smooth, young face pulls me into vertiginous territory. Barthes talks about ‘discovering’ (not just recognising) his mother in that image of her as a little girl. It’s her eyes that hold him, connect him. In none of these photos does my dad look into the camera (or back at me): not when he is shown on his own, not when he sits next to the other young PoW, not when he kneels in the first row of the group of seven. His gaze teeters out towards his right, unfocused. He is somewhere else.
Barthes also talks about dress locating someone of a previous generation in history. Military dress does that even better. Here is my dad in a uniform which replaced one I find even more troubling, that of a Wehrmacht-soldier. Face, gaze and context throw me about – between closeness and distance, rapport and alienation, wanting to lean in and turn away, some of which finds tentative expression in my work-in-process.
For example: I’ve been stitching into the image which shows him alone, adding layer on layer of crisscrossing blue thread. I want to build up more, create a form that juts out from the image like an extra-limb. It seems to me that not only do I want to give the photo a haptic quality, I want to give it ‘body’.
The dense web of mohair/silk yarn over my dad’s face has aspects of abjection as well as protection (mine? his?). The working process is slow, tender and piercing: a caress and a severing; also a bit like wrapping a beautiful bandage around a wound on someone’s head. I imagine breath underneath, and now I hold mine.
As my hands denied more stints with the needle I explored this in photoshop, closing in on that wavering gaze, its blurred shift to the right. Again and again I sat at the computer to stare at it.
Then I played, putting together mirror-halves, which led me to places where the sense of abjection and alienation assails. Much of this work-in-process doesn’t exist in real terms, the collages aren’t glued and can be re-arranged, these mirror-pieces reside on my computer, everything is contingent, and thus unsettling to me, who wants to present finished pieces. Part of me thinks that this may be a good thing, another part worries I’ll grind to a halt.
