I pasted this photo onto black paper, a page in a drugstore photo album, the summer of 1966, when I was nine. I used Elmer's Glue. It was taken with my first camera.Â
The thing about working with blurred snapshots is finding what might be inherently there rather than fixating on the unclear aspect. Colour helps. It gives the image a dreamy quality, or sometimes presents how a memory does.
This photo is not my mother and me. It is someone else's mother and me. We are standing on the highway near Jasper, Alberta. I am on a three week holiday with my friend's family. I have handed my friend my camera and she, also aged nine, is the one who takes the blurry photo. Right before she takes it her mother bends around me and says, Oh, it's so cold for July. I recall so clearly this moment, her touch, her words.Â
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A picture of a picture. The original was taken after the war when he was twelve years old. Yesterday, I set the black and white snap on the windowsill and took this image, then played with it.
A glance at a photo, any photo, would take him into a story, then other stories. Events, people, his childhood. I don't believe he ever saw this one. I found it after he died.Â
Close to the end, he fell asleep in his armchair in the middle of the afternoon. My parents liked a comfortable chair in the corner of their kitchen, and an ottoman. I walked in just as my father woke from his sleep. J was just here, he said. That's how he put it, like it was a visit, not a dream.Â
And we talked, he said.Â
J had been dead for years. His aunt. She couldn't have children. That's her, holding him.  Â
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