Homer Tunnel, 31/10/1937

I am here now.

The last month has been a wild roller coaster, what with moving into a new home and dealing with my mother’s passing. What truly helped were the  telephone calls, e-mails, texts and cards which many of you sent me. I cannot begin to thank you enough for your kindness and support. I am deeply grateful. But, bit by bit, things are beginning to settle down, and bit by bit, I am beginning to get on the road again. Because of you. Because of your kindness.

My profound thanks.

Those of you who have been through the experience of losing the last remaining parent will know something of its bitter-sweet nature. Sorting through stuff, working out what to keep and what to discard. My sister and I had already begun this process when our mother decided to go into a home. The New Zealand government allows you only $190,000 in assets before it will supply assistance to elderly people in care, so it was necessary to put her home on the market. At 92, with failing health, she was frankly not that interested in what happened to it. That was our job, but she had left fairly clear instructions as to who got what, and what was to be done with the rest. So we got stuck in, hunting through all the cupboards and working out what went in the skip, what was kept, and what was given away.

Along the way, we uncovered some treasures. The Maori language is a wonderfully subtle thing, and most of the words within it have layer upon layer of meaning and understanding. Depending upon the context in which one uses it, a word can have a variety of different interpretations. One such example is the word taonga. It means treasure. Not the stuff that drew Long John Silver or Capt Jack Sparrow to some island in the Caribbean. It means those things which we hold dear, which we consider truly precious. For Maori true taonga are not things with tradable and commercial value, but rather the things which connect us to our past, which are after all, the only things we are able to take with us when we go.

One day, while searching the bottom of the linen cupboard, we came across two small cardboard boxes. One, which appears to have been a chocolate box from the 1940s or 50s, contained a whole series of yellowing newspaper cuttings, celebrating both my parents’ achievements. There was a poem published in an Invercargill newspaper which my mother had written. I have a vague memory of her telling me how proud she was the day she won a poetry competition, and of the fact that she had won £2 for doing so. In the quiet moments, when they come, I intend to look through the rest of these. I came across a history of the New Zealand Forest service, a little battered around the edges, and set in that text-heavy style (10 point Times Roman) of yesteryear. As I lifted it, a large number of photographs fell out. Now photography is what I do, so I was immediately fascinated. There, looking up at me, were photographs of my father, frozen in time, standing amongst men whose names I will probably never know, smiling, jovial, with pinstripe moustache and centre-parted hair showing these were former times. There were aerial photographs of the house in Naseby, where I was born; there were aerial photographs of the family home at Ashley Forest near Rangiora. I was looking back through my own life and beyond, to a life behind my own, digging down to the sort of history and exposing the roots of the tree that I am.

And then I turned to the second box, a rather dog-eared white filing box of the sort you can buy a stationary warehouse for a dollar each. Its cover was buckled, from being buried under towels and pillow cases and the corners had that vaguely-shrewd look about them. You did not open it by simply lifting the lid, which had sort of moulded itself to the outside of the box. You had to ease the edge inwards and then lift it. So, putting it on my knee, sitting in the chair where my father sat when he was alive, I opened it up and stared into my mother’s past. And of course, my own.

There were photographs of her as a young woman. There was a photograph of my parents on their wedding day, with my cousin as bridesmaid. There were photographs of our family, my brother, sister and myself standing self-consciously as we were photographed, usually on some important occasion, such as our first day of school (I remember doing the same thing with my own children). There is a photograph, about 2 cm Square, of a cherubic mono-toothed baby, looking up and out to the left of the photograph, dressed in a hand knitted cardigan, obviously well-fed and happy. Who is that? I asked my sister. It is you, she chortled.

You will never get to see that photograph.

There is a photograph of four people standing on a pile of snow in front of a tunnel. The one on the the right, aged in her early 20s, wearing one of those dresses which has a very full skirt, smiling, happy and obviously having a good time, is my mother. At first there was nothing to help me with date and time, but a little detective work, knowing that she was born and grew up in Southland, told me that it was almost certainly the Homer Tunnel in Fordland. It is probably safe to assume she was on holiday with some of her friends.  then I turned it over. Inscribed on the back, in her painstaking cursive, were the words: Homer Tunnel, 31/10/1937. As I looked at it, a flash of memory came back to me, of her telling me of the fairly intense social life she had as a young woman. And of course there were other photographs inthe filing box, almost all black and white, still clear, distinct and unfaded. Such colour photographs as there were were already losing their dye layers. Usually the red layer goes first. There, before me, were all the postcards, the mile markers of her life, and of course the roots of my own. Moments frozen in time, slices taken from the continuum of her life. There were other faces looking out of the photograph at me, people whose names I will probably never know because there is nobody any more to give me that information. It occurred to me that so often we see our own life in isolation while in fact all our lives intersect in many and varied ways, at many different times, that life is not a single strand but in fact a complex interweaving, much like the tukutuku panels on the entrance to a wharenui, a Maori meeting house. Perhaps that is what the panels are trying to tell us.

The power of the photograph. Lately I have begun to wonder what it is about photography that makes it so special, so important. Is it a fabulous landscape, such as Ansell Adams or Edward Weston might have made? Is it a work made by sifting through the detritus of art history, a post-modern meandering of the sort you see in an art gallery? Or does the power of the photograph lie in its ability to document, to record life and preserve it to the edification of those who will look at it at a later time? Of course it does. Those simple black and white photographs of ordinary lives (which never are) may well be where the true power of photography lives. In the humble snapshot (which is not) there may be the enduring strength of the medium.

I remember a conversation with my good friend, Doc Ross. We were sitting one day, drinking coffee, and arguing benignly, as good friends do. Doc, who has an irritating habit of usually being right (I hate that) was launching into me. You know, Tony, he said, pointing to all the framed photographs on the wall of his gallery, many and varied, and testament to the fact that he is an inquisitive soul, you do not have any photographs. Yes I do, I retorted. I have hundreds of thousands of them. And how many of them are on paper, he asked? Ummm … perhaps a dozen, I replied. I do not really have anywhere to store them (weak excuse). I have perhaps 150,000 on my computer. I began to sense the ground slipping away beneath me. He went for the jugular. No, he announced triumphantly, you do not have any photographs. All you have are files. All you have are electrons in a box. You need to print them. Then you have photographs. I knew I was beaten.

And that he was right-yet again.

Every day millions of images are filed away in hard drives all over the planet, uploaded to Flickr, or posted on Facebook. We like to think of them as photographs, but in fact they are not. They are only virtual photographs, not real ones. It is only when we make them concrete, when we print them out, when we bring them from the arcane world of the computer into the light of day, when we make something we can touch and hold in our hands, that we actually have a photograph.

A tangible object.

A work on paper.

A photograph.