The irony is I'm a photographer's daughter. My father is a master of documenting history and those otherwise forgettable moments, (he never goes anywhere without a camera or a dog, or both), whereas I prefer to keep my images preserved in memory. Bottled tadpoles, swimming in gin and lined up in rows on musty shelves. The camera has always been an extension of him, but it pulls me away from experiencing the here and now; catapults my self-awareness back, even if I'm not in the shot, and more so if I have to take it.
In those instances when I want to remember, when I want to make a memorable mental picture, I use my sensory receptors like a butterfly net to catch it and screw it tight in a jam jar. Imprisoned, it, at first, flutters horribly, beating its wings against the glassed walls, until exhausted it sinks to the floor and settles, so that by the time it's doused in watered-down gin, it's quite tranquil.
Images, unlike butterflies, captured and contained in this way don't die or drown. They regress to a chrysalis and await their developing moment: their repeated re-release, where they project their flickering shadows around the brain's chambers and generate, in their person, reminiscence or nostalgia. Their repetitive finger puppet shows fills in the interludes, the fragments of inactive time.
This form of recall, for me, can often be overwhelming; saturated in a sensation that no photograph can return me to. I can walk the inside of a house from memory, smell and taste food, transport myself instantly to that beach or garden. There doesn't have to be a trigger, it's just there.
The camera, on the other hand, has not always been kind to this photographer's daughter, and neither sometimes has the photographer. “Stand there!...Smile!...Turn this way!...One more!...Move over!” Stiffened poses, forced smiles...until a very human, hunched and grimacing splodge, particularly during those awkward teenage years, imprints itself in front of a glorious background. But despite my own botched attempts to be in or take a picture, I do see the artistry in photography. I marvel at what that precious eye in a single blink can capture. What must it feel like to possess that! I curse my short-sight; blame it for my blurred focus and grainy vision.
No, I do not possess that kind of skill, despite my admiration. Words are my pictures, yet often it's pictures that inspire them. Go figure! And yes, memories, as with photographs, can be deceiving. There's a touch of fabrication. Memories can be made idyllic and photos can be airbrushed. Yet when I stand before the Shore with Red House, the floodgates open, even though I know it's of the artist's summer house in Aasgaardstrand, Norway, and not of Sausalito in California, that's where it takes me.
I'm standing on the harbour side-walk looking towards the jetty; in front of me the sea meets sky and my feet meet pastel-tinted rock formations. The late afternoon's colouring is still relatively light and warm. I dawdle, taking time on my own, away from my other day-coach-trippers, and consider how this setting is too perfect. The hillside combines so neatly with the shoreline, while the air is refreshing, and yet placid. A single, white, lone female records a potent memory of this picturesque San Francisco Bay Area city.
But what does this prove? That my memory is both infallible and very guilty of association.
