‘Just So’ Stories
A Grandson’s Account of his Grandfather’s Life and his Collection of Photographs.
Introduction
… an essential constancy of modern art - uniqueness of personality - persists; no longer manifested through facture, the individuality of touch, but through an unrepentant autobiographical confession or fantasy concerning those areas of human activity in which the artists are most singularly personal their literally - private lives. [Pincus-Witten 1977]
The aim of this thesis is to explore contemporary attitudes to photography and the degree to which photography has had an affect on autobiographical memory . The key vehicle for this exploration is my own studio practice which appropriates photographs originally taken by my grandfather, A.E. Ingham, some of which coincide with my own childhood and hence throw an illumine but disconcerting light on my own autobiographical memory. I propose to discuss ways in which autobiographical memory is formed, stored and retrieved, and to move on to consider how these processes have evolved through interaction with photography. The opening chapter initiates this investigation with an analysis of the subject matter of my grandfather’s collection of photography. The collection is a means by which I am able to examine the relationship between my own sense of autobiography and photographs of past events which form a part of that autobiography.
Initially, I am concerned with why, as an artist, I have been using the collection as a basis for my work and theoretical concerns. I begin, therefore, with an autobiographical approach, an account of my own childhood memories and how they connect to the photographs in the collection. Of necessity, this account is both a partial and fragmentary, and is in part informed by photographs themselves, as for example when these have triggered a further associative chain and/or network of memories. This narrative is thus written in a conventional autobiographical form, combining the ‘facts’ of my life with my own reminiscences of actual events.
There follows a biographical account of my grandfather’s life, using the written and anecdotal evidence I have been able to gather about his life, alongside my own personal recollections. It is included to make possible some understanding of his motivations for taking photographs and as a way of understanding my own interests in the collection. This biography is pertinent for the concerns of my thesis as it constructs and interprets a version of the past; as in their own way do autobiographical memory and photographs.
In the conclusion of this chapter I will begin to examine these two modes of description as ways of analysing and interpreting past events, and to consider how these subjective processes of recounting, themselves, can influence memories.
1. An Autobiographical Account of My Involvement with the Collection.
This autobiographical sketch is only a partial and fragmented account of my life as it takes its cue mainly from my past experiences with the collection of photographs. I am associated with the collection in many different ways. I am directly and indirectly implicated with some of the photographs. Although I was not present when the majority of the photographs were taken, I am depicted in others and have visited certain of the locations. At other times, I was actually present at the event and recognise a number of the people photographed. I have also been in situations where the photographs were presented as transparencies in the form of slide shows. When the collection came into my possession, I already knew some of the background from anecdotal evidence given to me by my family.
1.1. Working with my grandfather’s collection of photographs.
I started to use the collection as source material for my art practice in 1996. A year earlier, I made a conscious decision to change the way I worked. After making sculptural objects and site-specific installations for fifteen years, I had decided that my work had become too reliant on a given site and had become too impersonal. Reviewing my previous work, I found that mathematics was one area about which I had always been curious, but with which I had never directly engaged in my practice. I therefore initiated an investigation, both practical and theoretical, into some of the relationships between visual art and mathematics. One direction this exploration led me was to look at my family history. My father and his brother had studied mathematics at university and my mother's brother is a mathematics teacher, I had studied mathematics at A-Level. I became especially interested in my paternal grandfather who was a professor of mathematics at Cambridge University. It was at this stage that I decided to explore my own history and the history of the relationship I had to my grandfather by using his collection of photographs as a starting point.
I was also interested in the way that some of my sculptures and installations affected certain spectators, whereby they would be reminded of events from their own past. In a few instances, this seemed to be for them like Proust’s encounter with the madeleine, the work stimulating strong sensual memories. I therefore became curious about the role memory played when art works are confronted.
1.2. My childhood experiences with the collection.
In 1966 I returned to Britain from Colombia, my family having previously lived in Trinidad and Tobago, where I had been born in 1960. My mother, brother and I lived a couple of streets away from the house of my paternal grandfather and grandmother in Cambridge. It was here that I first remember meeting my grandfather. We would visit the house they called ‘Millington Road’ regularly, and after my grandfather’s death in 1967 I lived in this house until 1976.
For many years, and long before I moved to Cambridge, my grandfather had the habit of presenting slide-shows of his trips abroad and his other activities to family and friends. When I came to Cambridge these presentations continued and I became a part of his audience. These transparencies are now the major part of the existing collection.
When I think back to these presentations, the only group of images I clearly recall followed his return from a long trip to India. I have been told that this ‘event’ was staged in the drawing room and continued every evening for a week. Each evening the room had to be rearranged, causing quite a 'palaver'. He had made the projector himself, incorporating a wide-angle lens, made out of wood, pots and pans, and held together with nuts and bolts. It was not only able to show mounted transparencies but also un-mounted rolls of transparencies.
The transparencies were projected onto a large, 8ft x 6ft presentation screen. The screen covered nearly all of the French windows and when not in use was stored, retracted out of sight, behind the pelmet of the curtains.
He presented the transparencies after dinner and the performance lasted about two hours. While the transparencies were being shown he would describe , in detail, the places and people he had encountered on the trip. He would also explain at length why some of the photographs were over or under exposed, or were out of focus, and what would have been there if this had not been the case.
It is these incidents that have stuck in my mind most vividly. I remember one particular slide being so hopelessly over exposed, that nothing of any significance could be seen. This ‘image’ seems to have been burned into to my memory. My grandfather described in great detail what would have been there, which as I recall was an Indian temple.
Indeed, until I started to look at the collection more closely, I believed it to have been the Taj Mahal. I have since discovered that no images of that particular palace exist in the collection. I may therefore be confusing similar images of Indian temples in the collection – or it could just be that some of the transparencies are missing.
When I first went to these presentations, I was just six years old. I had never been to the cinema nor seen television, and therefore it was my first experience of this sort of visual spectacle. I remember, initially, being very excited. My family has over the years mythologized this particular event and other similar slide presentations. It is therefore difficult to separate what actually happened from the anecdotal reminiscences that have become embroidered over time. The transparencies themselves, my own memories and the memories of others is all that I have left of these episodes.
Furthermore, I am not sure if I am now only remembering memories of my older memories, or even remembering other people’s recounted memories of this event. This seeming conundrum became one of the factors behind my interest in the influence of photography on autobiographical memory. It seemed to me there was an interesting distinction between the supposed certainties of photographs as compared to the uncertainties of autobiographical memory.
1.3. Who has owned the collection.
When I came to live at the Millington Road house, after my grandfather’s death in 1967, the collection of his photographs and his photographic equipment were stored in a cupboard in a small dressing room next door to his study. My brother and I often played in this room and took an interest in the cameras, light meters, and flash guns, but took no special notice of the photographs. I especially remember playing with his homemade slide projector. I also used his enlarger when learning how to develop black and white films. This was in his old darkroom in the attic. It was not until the house was being cleared following my grandmother’s death in 1983, that his photographs resurfaced. They passed first to my uncle and then to my brother, before being left in another cupboard in my mother’s house. I took possession of them in 1996.
1.4. My encounters with the collection.
When I first took possession and re-encountered the transparencies, after a thirty-year gap, I started to remember the slide-shows. As I immersed myself further into the collection, I came to recall the sofa, the darkness, and the musty smell of the drawing room. The bleached out slide and the animals made on the screen with the shadows from our hands also came to mind. From these memories I started to recollect the room in detail and all the other activities that had taken place there.
Memories of my grandmother reading to my brother and I also came to mind. She would read aloud from Alice in Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit and the Just So and other stories by Rudyard Kipling. I remembered my grandmother crying while reading the story of Riki Tiki Tavi, a mongoose who dies heroically in one of Kipling's stories. And I remembered the Jabberwocky.
I recall the room being a dark, dusty, heavy brown, with peeling brown and beige William Morris designed wallpaper and cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling. There was an out-of-tune upright piano, on which the slide projector sat. We were only allowed in when accompanied by an adult. The transparencies seemed to have acted as a shortcut to these memories, condensing and focussing them so they became clear and resonant.
At first it had been the collection as a whole that focussed these memories. When I opened the bags the photographs had been stored in, there was a vague smell of photographic chemicals. This smell, initially, reminded me of the dressing room and the cupboard in which the photographs had been stored. I was reminded of the times my brother and I would dress up in our home-made Batman and Robin outfits and play in this room. The smell also brought back memories of all the darkrooms I had been into in my life. A flood of memories had started to come back to me.
Looking at and handling the transparencies also lead me to be reminded of the other parts of the Millington Road house. It was where my father and uncle were born, and had lived from the 1930s to the 1950s and many of their toys and sports equipment where still there when we moved in. There had been no decoration and virtually no maintenance for many years. It still had old DC electricity and the only heating came from the coal fireplaces in each room. There were threadbare Persian rugs rather than carpets on the floors.
When we moved into the house, my grandfather’s study was changed into a bedroom for my brother and I. Overnight it went from being a classic academic’s room with a large old-fashioned wooden desk, armchair, fireplace, and papers strewn about the place, to being a children’s bedroom. The beige walls were re-papered in flowered lime green, designed by the children’s book illustrator Jan Pienkowski who ironically also went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he read Classics and English. The carpets were light in colour and the furniture had a modern feel to it: greater transformation in the way the room looked and felt was hardly imaginable.
Again the transparencies had elicited detailed memories of my childhood. I was not surprised by what I remembered, I ‘knew’ about all these incidences, events and places, but I was surprised by how the transparencies had evoked such strong associative chains and networks of memory. When I looked at them again my memory of these places and events became sharper and more intense. My memories began to ‘join up’, not in any particular order, and to weave in with other people’s stories of that time. Throughout this process of remembrance, triggered by looking at the transparencies, I switched between seeing a scene through my own eyes and viewing myself present in the scene. I was apart of, and involved in, the scenes depicted in the photographs and but also detached, looking into and upon these same scenes.
When the collection first came into my possession the quantity and disorganisation of the transparencies overwhelmed me. I felt reluctant and even repulsed by the transparencies and these feelings of reluctance and repulsion made me remember why I had not wanted to use them before. The collection led me back to memories of the break up of my parents’ marriage. It seemed to symbolise the strange and strict upbringing my uncle and father had gone through and the attempt by my grandmother to bring up my brother and I in the same way. It seemed to represent why my father was estranged and distant. I had feelings of morbid fascination and revulsion, but at the same time, I was deeply curious and intrigued by the collection. It had a crumbling presence and for me a sadness about it.
1.5. Reasons I am using the transparencies in my practice.
I decided to work with the collection despite these ambivalent thoughts and emotions. After my first trawl through the photographs, four boxes of transparencies stood out from the perceived chaos. All four were in the distinctive orange colour of the Agfa photographic company . They had my grandmother’s handwriting on them. The slides were numbered and in some cases annotated. Three of the boxes contained slides from my grandfather’s trip to India and the fourth was of a sports day at my old school.
I was interested to see if I remembered any of the transparencies of India. After looking at them for a while I got a sense of recognition from some of them. There was nothing I remembered specifically, it was more to do with the general ‘look’ of them. None of the predominant features in the slides seemed to conjure up any memories. It was some of the small details in the landscapes and skies, in the transparencies, that seem to evoke some recollections of his slide presentations. It was almost the ‘heat’ that came from the images, the glow they had, that was evocative.
The other box of slides was of a sports day in 1963 at King’s College Choir School, which I attended from 1968-1972. The places in the slides were instantly recognisable. The playing fields, buildings and the swimming pool were all there as I remembered them. One slide stood out from the rest. It was of a boy somersaulting into a swimming pool off a diving board. Looking at the slide immediately transported me back to the times when I swam in that pool. I was reminded of the coldness of the water. The pool had been unheated. I recognised and remembered the rail and steps around the surface edge of the water. I remembered exactly the fittings that clasped the rail and joined it to the side of the pool. I recollected the roughness of the coir matting that covered the diving board. The remembering of it made my feet tingle. It reminded me of when I swam two lengths underwater, or it might have only been one and a half, I found I could not remember exactly.
Detail of Kings College Choir School swimming pool showing diving board. [Images from the collection]
1t was this image of the boy somersaulting that ‘pricked’ me, as Roland Barthes would say . I was curious about this image because the unknown boy looked similar to me, yet was ten years older. It seemed to me that he was caught in a frozen moment of flight, perfectly still and silent. As I looked at the slide further I wondered what was going on in the photograph. Was this the moment after the thud and twang of the diving board and before the crash of the water and the applause? Was he showing off? Competing in a competition? Was he demonstrating an intricate dive for the benefit of the spectators? Did he have time to fully rotate and make that perfect entry? On the other hand, did he belly flop into the water splashing the spectators and skulk away, embarrassed by his failure? I felt as though I was becoming absorbed into the photograph.
After these thoughts about what was happening in the slide I looked at it again. I started to remember other aspects of the pool. From the glow that came from the slide I felt it looked like a beautiful summer’s day, yet I knew how cold that water was, ‘its good for you’ cold. This then instantly triggered a memory of my father talking about his swimming exploits in the very same pool. This then lead me to think about the times when my brother and I were on holiday with him and we swam in icy mountain lakes, thinking at the time what a stupid activity this was and saying ‘no’ after a couple times of being miserably frozen. This, then, reminded me of the tradition that my grandfather kept of ‘breaking the ice’ on Christmas Day where members of a swimming club would swim in the frozen river Cam. This also made me think back to when I was a member of a local swimming club and being a successful competitor, yet being very bored.
After looking at these two sets of slides I became intrigued by the different ways they provoked my memories. I had never been to India but I remembered the event of seeing the slides. I had never, as far as I can remember, seen the slides of the sports day before, but had been to the places depicted in them. Both elicited strong and detailed memories, which were both visual and sensual. I had felt the past unfold.
Because of the memories that had been stirred by the slides and my curiosity as how photographs could do this, I had gone from a feeling of ambivalence towards the collection to having a strong desire to use and incorporate the slides into my art practice.
1.6. Art from the Transparencies
After taking some time to look through the collection again, I came across three slides that fascinated me. I always seemed to be drawn back to them. The first two slides were next to each other on a roll of film that had been taken by a half-frame camera. The image on the left was of a hollyhock and the one on the right was of my grandfather. I was interested in these images because the hollyhock was from the front garden of my grandparent's house. This reminded me of the garden and of my grandmother who was a botanist. The image of my grandfather interested me because it was one of only five or six of him in the collection and it was close to the image I had had of him in my memory.
Also at the time, I simply liked the fact that they were taken one after the other and were by and of my grandparents. When I first looked at these slides I assumed that my grandmother had taken the photograph of my grandfather. On closer inspection it seems more likely that my grandfather took all the photographs and the one of him is a self-portrait.
Using these transparencies, initially projected on to a sheet of paper, I produced a painting. Eventually, after going through a number of processes, it became a diptych. The original painting was cut up into one-centimetre wide strips from top to bottom. The corresponding strips from each half of the painting were then stuck down next to each other on a board. This process was repeated on a second board creating two paintings. These were then placed next to each other. The two halves of the painting looked identical on first reading but no two elements were the same. I was exploring ideas to do with genetics at the time and the painting was a culmination of this investigation.
The third slide was of the boy somersaulting into the swimming pool, of which I made a drawing by projecting it onto a large sheet of paper and tracing the outline of every differentiated tone. After a while, I decided to draw over this initial drawing by similarly tracing the transparencies that came before and after this image. This resulting image had elements of abstraction besides more 'readable' figurative elements, giving a tension between the discernible and the indiscernible.
My intention at the time was not to make a picture which told a story or that could be read in a conventional narrative or figurative way. The work was to have no beginning, middle, and end. The viewing became a journey of looking at and with the work, rather than being about my history or a history triggered by recognisable narrative elements.
I explored this process further using the transparencies my grandfather had taken in India. They were the only transparencies out of the 4,000 that had been properly catalogued – my grandmother’s doing – but they were also integral to my memories of the week-long slide-show. I finally produced seven of these 'drawings' using the same technique.
The process of making this work seemed to me to be both opposite and yet similar to the developing of a black and white photograph in a dark room. The projected image slowly appeared on the paper as I drew around everything, taking three to four hours per slide. At first I could see the image of the original slide, but with the addition of each new layer the previous images became increasingly indistinct. It was not unlike leaving the paper in the developer too long: eventually it will go black. I saw this process as a metaphor for how we forget and remember the past. Within the general tangle of lines, there were parts and areas that were recognisable and distinct. These were not separate from the rest of the image and they seemed to flow out of the abstract morass.
Since completing these drawings, I have made work that uses the collection more directly, with the photographs becoming a part of the work rather than just a starting point. I carried out a series of explorations into how the collection could be use to generate work about the relationship between memory and photography. Starting by drawing directly onto the enlarged photographs, I used the same overlapping technique as described above. This way of working made more obvious the source material used to make the drawings and at the same time retained the idea that the image was in some way being erased and fragmented. I saw this as being linked to the way our autobiographical memory works, with some things being very clear while are hazy and indistinct. But although I was partly satisfied with this way of working, the drawings still had an ambiguity that for me was unsatisfactory.
I therefore decided to explore the images in the collection even more directly by using the photographs without the addition of a drawn element. I made a series of works that involved reversing and overlapping the same image on top of each other by using acetate copies. These rotations, reflections, transformations, and doublings scrambled the reading of the image. The work produced from these explorations had, for me, a peculiar and uncanny quality.
I then made a series of works that explored the way the images on a roll of film relate to one another. Most of the collection is in roll form and not mounted. In the previous drawings, I had projected twelve consecutive images on top of each other. I was now more interested in what would happen to these images when they were separated and made sequential. Some of the rolls had a filmic quality about them, a movement through time and space that I found intriguing. I cut the printed and enlarged photographs in half and put them together with half of the subsequent image, in an attempt to bring out some of their narrative and documentary aspects. Despite a disjointing effect, this tended to emphasise the feeling of transition between individual photographs. Also, in closing the gaps between the photographs and creating new ones I was exploring the idea that memories do not come back to us in a smooth continuous flow, but are distorted and have a ‘chopped-up’ quality: mixed up, confused, overlapped, non-sequential, and incomplete.
From this series of works I explored further the narrative and fragmentary nature of memory. Using a projector and a revolving mirror, I was able to both project and interrupt the image, which travelled around the room, distorting and undulating on the walls and ceiling. At some points in its journey it could be seen clearly and at others it was indecipherable: flashes of clarity mixed in with periods of obscurity. By adding more projectors and automatically changing the transparencies, these states of confusion and clarity were further emphasised.
Following this work, I explored the oral aspects of narrative that are set up when photographs are looked at in various private and public situations, taking my grandfather's 'performances' as a starting point. These narratives were an interweaving of my grandfather's biography, my grandmother's storytelling, and my own autobiography. By 'performing' the transparencies, I set up a situation whereby my grandfather’s use of the collection was highlighted as a source of remembrance and memories.
The next major development involved making slide projectors out of a number of old cameras, one of which had belonged to my grandfather. The transparencies went into the camera where the film would have been. With the camera’s back removed, the shutter permanently open, and a light shone from the back through the transparency, these cameras were transformed into home-made projectors, with the lens focusing the image, thus reversing the original process and function of these instruments. I then photographed the projected images and enlarged them to various sizes.
In a darkened room I set up an installation using a number of these camera/projectors, the images produced being circular, due to the small torches used as light sources, and differing in size and intensity depending on their distance from the wall. This work has been my major concern up until the present day.
1.7 Reflections on the Autobiographical Account.
Writing this account made me aware that however objective I thought I was being, the act of writing down my memories and remembering events, whether triggered by the transparencies or from what I ‘knew’ about my past, had an effect on these ‘memories’ themselves. Inevitably, the account was an approximation, an editorial process whereby I was adding and taking away from what I thought I knew. Even at the time of writing I was aware of editing to a certain extent, but I later came to question by what criteria I had come to mention some events and exclude others. This suggests another level of complexity at work in autobiographical memory, leading me to question how different ‘types’, ‘systems’, and ‘processes’ can be interpreted and represented.
Following my initial impulse to investigate the relationship between visual art and mathematics, as I used the collection further I gradually became more interested in autobiographical memory’s connection with photography. In particular, I became interested in my own autobiographical memory and how this, through photographs, could be linked in with ideas of biography and autobiography.
When I read Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida I noticed that he investigates photography from the viewpoint of himself as a spectator of photographs. He says that, ‘The disorder which from the very first I had observed in photography – all practices and all subjects mixed up together – I was to rediscover in the photographs of the Spectator whom I was and whom I now wanted to investigate.’ [Barthes 2000:16] He starts this investigation by choosing certain photographs that ‘agitate’ him and cause an ‘adventure’ to occur. He names this attraction an ‘animation’, adding: ‘The photograph itself is in no way animated [I do not believe in “lifelike” photographs], but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure.’[Barthes 2000:18-20.] I experienced a similar ‘animation’ when I looked through my grandfather’s collection of photographs. Most were interesting on the level of curiosity, but one, the boy somersaulting into a swimming pool, set me off on an ‘adventure’ that created an associative chain and network of memories.
2. A Biography of A.E. Ingham
‘He enjoyed doing mathematical puzzles, and photography, at which he experimented endlessly with great expertise’ [A.E. Ingham Obituary]
This short biography of my grandfather aims to offer some insights into the reasons why he took up photography and why he took the photographs he did. It also illuminates the milieu of a Cambridge academic. I have drawn upon written information from libraries and other sources along with anecdotal evidence supplied by my family. I have also drawn on some of my own memories of him.
Albert Edward Ingham was born in Northampton in 1900, the son of a ‘boot-operative’. He studied at Cambridge University where he had a prestigious career as a mathematics student and then taught at King’s College until his retirement from Director of Studies in 1959. He was made fellow of the Royal Society in 1945 and Reader of Mathematical Analysis at King’s in 1953, a position he held until his death in 1967. He was variously described as: 'lucid', 'eloquent', 'conscientious', 'impersonal', 'a perfectionist', 'shy', 'modest', 'reserved', 'melancholic', 'ironic' and 'loyal'. His main passions in later life were cricket and photography. His obituary printed in King’s College magazine is attached as an appendix, elucidates this further
His main interest in mathematics was the study of number theory and, more specifically, prime numbers and their distribution and predictability. In 1933, he wrote a book called ‘The Distribution of Prime Numbers’. This was reprinted in a new edition in 1964, and again in 1990, and is still used in undergraduate mathematics departments in many universities as an introduction to prime number theory. The introduction on the back of this new edition says, ‘Despite being long out of print, this Tract still remains unsurpassed as an introduction to the field, combining an economy of detail with a clarity of exposition which eases the novice into this area.’
During the early 1930s he was a supervisor to Alan Turing, famous for breaking the Enigma Code during the Second World War and for his ground breaking work in the invention of the electronic computer. At the time I learnt about this connection between Turing and my grandfather, I was exploring aspects of Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Consciousness in my own art practice. Turing had come up in this research because of his ‘test’ to see if computers could show signs of ‘intelligence’. For me this was connected to the idea that up until fairly recently human memory has been seen by some to be analogous to the way information is stored and retrieved by a computer. In my chapter on ‘memory systems’ I investigate this connection further.
In a biography of Alan Turing by Andrew Hodges mention is made of my grandfather, whom he describes as, ‘serious but with a wry humour, the embodiment of mathematical rigour’[Hodges:31] Commenting on Turing’s disappointment at not getting a fellowship, Hodges says, ‘As forecast he failed to gain a Cambridge appointment. Ingham wrote from King’s encouraging him to stay for another year, and this made his mind up.’ [Ibid:67]
In a letter written to Turing, on the 1st June 1937, my grandfather comments on the above incident saying, ‘You were, of course, unlucky in your subject, but the appointments show clearly enough that absence from Cambridge does not diminish one’s chances, or expose one to the dangers of being overlooked,’ Although my grandfather seems to have been conservative by nature he was, by all accounts non-judgmental, being more interested in mathematics than personal mores. From my grandfather’s correspondence with Turing, it seems he was sympathetic to Turing during the trials and tribulations he experienced at Cambridge over his homosexuality. In the same letter my grandfather says, ‘I was glad to have your letter, and interested to learn that you had decided to apply for the Proctor Fellowship. I hope you will get it, and that my letter has not influenced you in a way which you will regret.’ A page form this letter is reproduced in the next illustration.
As is not uncommon with mathematicians, my grandfather’s main burst of creative energy was in his twenties and thirties. After 1945, he continued to publish occasional papers, but increasingly devoted himself to academic administration and teaching. It was at this point that he took up photography with a passion. His initial interest was in black and white photography and it was not until about 1954 that he turned almost exclusively to colour transparency film. He had several cameras including a Leica.
His obituary says, ‘He enjoyed photography, at which he experimented endlessly with great expertise.’ Curiously, when I think back to the time I spent with my grandfather, I do not remember him ever taking a photograph of me or a photograph of anything else for that matter. Other than photography, his main passions in later life were mathematical puzzles and cricket. He loved cricket so much that he played into his sixties and, even though he lived in Cambridge, he arranged for my grandmother to have their sons born in Leeds so that they would be qualified to play for Yorkshire.
My memories of him now are of a distant, shadowy figure. Coming down from working in his study at meal times, when a gong was sounded and his name, ‘A.E.’ or ‘Pa’, was called out. I have memories of him talking during his slide shows. I have no recollection of his death or the events of the time that surrounded it. I recall that many years later I was told that he had died on a mountain pass high up in the Alps and his ashes had to be flown back as hand luggage. Since being told this story, I have an image of my grandmother, who was very wiry and fit, striding off into the distance up the mountain leaving my grandfather, who was a ‘heavy’ man, lying by a rock looking out on to a scene he had often photographed as he expired. This is linked an abiding memory of how fast and vigorously my grandmother would walk. She was always frustrated with my brother and I as we ‘dawdled’ fifty yards behind her. We just could not keep up with her furious pace.
After his death I occasionally met his old friends and colleagues, who would always talk fondly of him. I remember distinctly a pre-eminent Egyptian mathematician visiting the house. He was desperate to buy my grandfather’s mathematical notes and papers. I think he has stuck in my mind because he would drink his tea by holding the saucer and not the handle of the cup. My grandmother resisted his offers and kept the papers in an old cupboard in the house.
The anecdotal evidence about my grandfather and his photography from family and friends mainly surrounds his slide presentations, in particular their duration and the fact that the content appeared unedited. It seems he never exhibited any embarrassment when showing transparencies that could be seen as controversial. I have been told that he would show transparencies of the children in various states of undress and when he showed transparencies of erotic carvings from temples in India he would deliberately pause and point out their poses.
2.1 Commentary on the Biography
Some of the reasons why my grandfather might have taken photographs are illuminated by Susan Sontag when she observes in her book On Photograph that photography ‘….is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power.’[Sontag:8] All these aspects can be seen in my grandfather’s collection. According to Sontag the idea that a photograph would not be taken at a family event or on holiday has become seen as ‘indifference or even transgressive.’[Ibid:9] She emphasises this by saying, ‘It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.’ [Ibid:9-10] This seems to have been one of the reasons my grandfather took so many transparencies of his travels. They were not only for personal consumption but were taken with their potential audience in mind.
Sontag also argues that taking photographs on holiday assuage the anxiety of not working and gives the holidaymaker/photographer something to do. It becomes an ‘imitation of work.’[Ibid:9-10] My grandfather was semi-retired when he started taking photographs, and his children had already left home. As someone who always liked to keep busy, it seems likely that the taking of photographs as a replacement for work whilst on holiday was one reason for this intense activity.
Sontag also talks about the sexual nature of taking a photograph. She argues that because there is a distance between the photographer and the photographed this cannot be seen as a sexualised act. She stresses this by saying, ‘The camera does not rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate – all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.’[Ibid:13] There seems to be an argument here about permission, permission to possess an image, to take a photograph, to own it without consent. Great distress can be caused when a photograph is taken without the consent of the person photographed. The simple fact of someone possessing a photograph without consent can cause anxiety. In my grandfather’s case it seems that when he wanted to capture his experience of an event he had little thought of what the subjects of his photographs might feel.
Sontag also discusses the family photo album as substitute for the dispersed extended family and as a way of keeping them close. She says, ‘Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family’s photographic album is generally about the extended family – and, often, is all that remains of it.’[Ibid:9] Sontag continues from this line of argument to the idea that, ‘A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.’[Ibid:16] This then leads to the idea that it is a sense of the unattainable and a distance that makes possible erotic feelings when in front of a photograph. She argues that. ‘such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.’[Ibid.]
There are some aspects of this in my grandfather’s collection of photographs. The family at the time was dispersing and he did record the events surrounding this dispersal. This does not seemed to have been out of any sense of nostalgia, but was rather a duty. He did not keep the photographs with him at all times. Once they had been viewed they were not carried on his person or put in an album, and were rarely, if ever, seen again. The pleasures he gained in taking and looking at photographs lay elsewhere.
Conclusions
The personal autobiographical narrative, in relation to my grandfather’s photographs, serves as a starting point for an inquiry into what happens when attempts are made to communicate and represent memories. It is now clear to me that memories are contingent upon how and when an event was remembered at the time the event happened and the circumstances under which the remembering occurred. Memories are also changed by what happens, socially and personally, in the intervening time between an event and the remembering of that event. Unlike the habitual acts of memory in our daily lives, when we are required to remember details from our past we have to think consciously to remember them. This difference between ‘knowing’ and ‘remembering’ is crucial to the development of my project. I know I was in a drawing room at an event, family members have told me this. But I also remember being there. In chapter four I will discuss how photography has affected these different states of recollection.
Furthermore, memories are not fixed and stored intact waiting for the right cue to come along to re-form them into snapshots as if they had been perfectly preserved in amber. They are mediated, subjective and subject to change and this is especially the case of what cognitive neurobiologists call ‘autobiographical memory’. Writing an account of a memory is therefore doubly mediated: it necessarily brings into play both the original memory on which the act of writing is predicated and those cues that the act of writing itself introduces. I scrutinise this ‘performative’ act of describing the way memories are created in later chapters.
Every time I look at my grandfather’s collection of photographs, even now that I know it thoroughly, memories surface and remind me of places, people, and events from my formative years. I have often felt as though I have entered another world, a world seen through my grandfather’s eyes via the lens of his camera. I have found myself in a space between what the photograph depicted and my experience of looking at it. It was a space in which I was both self-conscious and at the same time unaware of where I was.
It is this simultaneity of experiences that makes me feel strange and is similar to how I sometimes feel when a certain type of memory of a past event surfaces in my mind. I got to know him better as a human being rather than the mysterious and often mythical figure he had become in my mind. I felt I was walking in the Alps, looking in detail at plants and insects, and punting and picnicking on the river Cam. The images started to resonate and become a part of my memory. The photographs seemed very alive. I had no sense of the morbidity that I had felt when I first looked at the transparencies five or six years ago. They had moved me and made me question my pre-concepts of memory, photography and the relationships between them.
This idea that photography has altered our perception of the past, and even the perception of time itself, is central to my inquiry into photography’s role in changing memory. Roland Barthes sometimes saw photography as a living ghost of the past, here and not here at the same time, creating a fundamental shift in the way the world is perceived and conceived. When I look at my grandfather’s photographs I see them as being alive. Not just alive when they were taken but alive now. Not just, ‘I was there’ or ‘I could have been there’ or even ‘I feel like I am there’, but ‘I am there and they are here, now’. It is this ‘certain, but fugitive testimony’ [Barthes 2000:93] that confirms, but also creates doubts in, the veracity of our own memories. These issues are addressed more fully in Chapter Three.
In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes narrowed down his field of enquiry by dividing photography into three practices. He names these as: the operator [the photographer], the spectrum [the photographed], and the spectator [the viewer]. This echoes the way I have attempted to analyse my grandfather’s collection of photographs from autobiographical, biographical and taxonomical points of view. Barthes rejects looking at photography from the photographer’s point of view, as he is not a photographer himself. He is uneasy when he is photographed and is dissatisfied with the resultant images of himself. They never capture who he thinks he is or wants to be. [Barthes 2000:10-15] Because of this he sees, ‘the Photograph is the advent of the other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.’ [Barthes 2000:12]
He argues that, looking at oneself in a photograph, creates a different way of viewing the world and finds it ‘odd that no one has thought of the disturbance [to civilisation] which this new action causes.’ This rupture occurs because for the first time people have been able to see their image in a fixed and ‘unmediated’ state as a photographic object and because of this he wants a new way of ‘thinking about looking’ and even a ‘History of looking’. [Ibid] It is this ‘disturbance’ that Barthes talks about in relation to the way photography has changed the way we perceive the world, which is crucial to my concern with memory and photography. I argue that this same ‘disturbance’ that Barthes describes has also altered our relationship with memory. It has changed the way we look at ourselves and therefore changes the way we think about ourselves. As a consequence of these changes memory has also changed.
Photography can in some ways trigger memory, but for Barthes, this is not what is essential about photography, separating it from other forms of images and representations. Although Barthes dismisses memory as the essential element that makes photography different from other forms of representation, which I expand on in Chapter Three, I would argue that photography, due to a combination of its ‘nature’ and its ‘culture’, has played a part in altering our perception of the past and therefore it has stimulated an evolutionary shift in the way our autobiographical memory operates. In the next chapter I look more closely at ‘Autobiographical Memory’ and how it functions differently from other types of memory.
This is a transcript of my grandfather’s obituary published in the King’s College Magazine in 1967.
“Albert Edward Ingham joined the College from the University of Leeds, where he was Reader in Mathematical Analysis, in 1930, to fill the vacancy on the staff caused by the sudden and untimely death of Frank Ramsey. He had previously been a Fellow of Trinity, where he had also been a Scholar, from 1922 24. With his remarkable capacity for loyalty to institutions he became a devoted member of his new College while retaining his ties with the old one, of whose generous invitations to feasts he regularly took advantage.
He was born at Northampton on the 3 April 1900 and educated at Stafford Grammar School, where he was reckoned to be the most brilliant pupil they had had. His father, also A. E. I., a ‘boot operative' invented the 'velschoen', for which his firm paid him an honorarium of one pound. [He himself wore boots until he was sixty.] At Trinity he won the highest mathematical honours of the University, including a Smith's Prize, and was elected to a Fellowship at his first attempt as well as to an 1851 Senior Exhibition. Before going to Leeds in 1926 he had a short spell at Gottingen. On his appointment at King's he was also made University Lecturer, and later [after two years as Cayley Lecturer], he became Reader in Mathematical Analysis in 1953, which he remained until this year.
On graduation he had begun research in the notoriously difficult subject of the analytic theory of numbers. Considerable advances in this were being made by G. H. Hardy and by J. E. Littlewood, to whom Ingham owed an especial debt. Throughout his career he worked in this or closely related fields, and in 1932 he published The Distribution of Prime Numbers [Cambridge Mathematical Tracts No. 30]. This and his articles in journals, all marked by exceptional lucidity, earned him in 1945 his Fellowship of the Royal Society, a distinction which he characteristically did not mention for the King's Register. Lucidity, accuracy and conscientiousness were indeed the hallmarks of all he did, of his lectures [delivered in a gown which was sea green but not incorruptible], and of his supervisions, which were each preceded by anything up to an hour or more of mental wrestling with scripts however muddled. His lectures were more than that: they earned from Hardy the epithet 'eloquent'. The conscientiousness extended to such things as setting examinations, an exceptionally onerous task in the mathematical disciplines; and although one might lament the time and pains he spent in worrying over trifles, this was an essential accompaniment of his intellectual virtues. If this Report contains in future more misplaced commas and imperfect letters, it will be for lack of his wryly but unhesitatingly accepted responsibility. When he retired in 1959 from his College offices of Lecturer and Director of Studies, he had done nearly thirty years, including the war years [for most of which he was separated from his family, evacuated to America] of teaching which was utterly conscientious, if somewhat impersonal, and undertaken in the spirit of the Spartan boy with the fox gnawing at his vitals. The perfectionism rubbed off on the pupils, as many later realised with gratitude.
Ingham ['A. E.' to his close friends, but he was essentially a surnames man] was shy, modest and reserved by nature, though sociable and a frequent diner in hall. But his marriage in 1932 to Rose Marie ['Jane'] Tupper Carey helped him to make his home in Millington Road a place of resort for his pupils. Everything was done for their two Sons. Their dining room became a work shop. And when, in due course, they went to King's College School, he developed another loyalty which continued to the end, long after they had left. He always played cricket for the Fellows against the School. Great was his delight when, as a sexagenarian, he scored his first fifty at cricket, against the College staff. When, a month before he died, someone tried to raise a side for a long vacation match, Ingham was the only Fellow to put his name down. Watching cricket also, at Fenner's, was a favourite pastime of his, as it was of Hardy's. Between overs he would correct scripts or devise examination questions. He enjoyed doing mathematical puzzles, and photography, at which he experimented endlessly with great expertise. His life was simple. He had no car, and used for more than forty years the Sunbeam bicycle he was given as a reward for matriculation. He never possessed a radio, let alone a television set. Mountain walking occupied his holidays. The only mathematical conferences he ever attended were at Bologna in 1926 and Moscow in 1966. Like many shy people he loved small children and was at his ease with them, wholly off his dignity; and he went out of his way to be kind to people who had to make their way, as he had done, without the initial advantages which many of those around him had enjoyed.
In college meetings he predictably put the conservative view, sometimes with a melancholy irony that could not fail to amuse. There was something of Jacques about him. Impatient of any nonsense or fuss, he had complete integrity, and was not afraid of being in a minority of one. He had the great happiness of seeing his elder son Michael, after winning a Scholarship to the College and the Isaac Newton Studentship of the University, elected to a Fellowship in 1961.
After he retired from college teaching he paid a visit to India, but had to return suddenly for an operation, from which he recovered well. His death occurred suddenly and almost painlessly on 6 September 1967 at the age of 67, from heart failure on a path high in the Alps near Chamonix, while he was on a walking holiday with his wife. His quiet and courteous presence will be much missed from the Fellows' Combination Room”.
Mark Ingham 2005