I am looking at the first page of an open photographic album from my early childhood. The black and white photograph in the centre of a black sheet is the very first picture which my father made after my arrival home from the maternity hospital. I am lying in a crib, wearing a pullover and a skullcap, the rest is hidden in a swathe. The album page is dominated by a large inscription “MARTINA 21. 5. 1970“. My father, with the thoroughness typical of him, supplemented the first photographic testimony about my existence with a few pieces of important data, adding the exact time of my birth – 20.30 hrs CET – and the topographic information – Prague-Karlov. What inevitably follows is my weight and length. Here, my father displayed something of a sense of humour, since he converted my newborn weight to tons and kilometres. It appears that his second daughter weighted 0.0035 ton and measured 0.0005 km from tip to toe. In order to properly celebrate my birth, he and my sister invented a motto for me: “Martinousek the bit, she yet measures a whit.”

The next pages of my album do not display anything that would depart distinctively from the line of traditional family albums: my first bath, christening at St Margaret, in the arms of grandma and grandpa in Louny, in a pram at Strahov, in a park with my little sister, the first Christmas by the tree, the first steps, in a pram again, holiday in Beskydy, on a sandpit, on a jungle gym… (The only exception is several photographs from bathing on the eve of my christening. These photographs are, however, so inconspicuous and ordinary that they do not reveal anything of what followed and what was the immediate consequence of the ritual of amateur photography itself. My father lit the evening scene for so long that the photo lamp, which he used for the sake of better light, got overheated, cracked and burnt me at the age of three weeks so heavily that I was lucky to survive. The result of this photographic séance was several scars and strained vocal cords that needed medical treatment even until I touched upon puberty, not to mention my father’s trauma from the fact that he, by unfortunate accident, nearly affected and mutilated his own daughter almost for life. Alas, even photography can play such a tragic role in a family’s life.) The album ends in the year of 1976. The pictures prove that, at that time, I could already swim and swerve a little on my skis. Since I was small, I fancied leafing not only through my own album but also through the albums of my sister and my parents and grandparents (my interest in the photographs of other people was, nevertheless, still surpassed by a certain early narcissistic fascination with my own looks in the first months after I was born and in my pre-school age). My family was confronted with my constant demands for due information, without which many photographs would have only remained unimportant records of the past. Who is the man wearing the hat? Who is the lady with the ice-cream? Is this really our dad? Why do you look so weird in that picture? Did I really look like this?

For me, family albums never ceased to represent an irreplaceable source of information about both the distant and the rather recent past. They provide a relatively direct testimony about what happened, and although even photographs may be deceptive, they are a quite exact imprint of reality, or even its death mask – a trace of what once was and what does not exist any more. Before the invention of photography, there were no means capable of capturing a scene in a single moment, of protecting it from the succession of events and images that followed, and thus permanently freezing it in stillness (which, of course, does not mean invariability of meaning). The only tool available to preserve the past in the pre-photographic era was human memory. But you know and I know that human memory cannot provide a mimetic image of a moment, because it always is a certain kind of subjective interpretation, and that it is, moreover, imperfect. It is eroded by amnesia and is often marked by too many other experiences which obscure and change the original source. On the other hand, a photograph as such cannot tell stories – although it conserves the image of a moment, the image itself does not explain associations and contexts which produce meaning. It thus seems that, in order to capture the past the best, we must look for photographs that are closely linked with personal testimonies – i.e. photographs accompanied by oral histories, by experiences passed on orally, and by a concerned (and not objectifying, scientific or positivist) search in the archive of human memory. John Berger in his treatise on the function of photography distinguishes between two totally different uses of this medium. He opines that, on one hand, there are photographs belonging to a private experience, and, on the other, photographs used publicly. While the private photographs – as are, for example, portraits of a mother or a daughter – are evaluated and read “in a context which is continuous with that from which the camera removed it,” the public photographs – and mainly those reproduced in printed media – are representations “which have nothing to do with us, their readers, or with the original meaning of the event.” In the case of the private photographs, the camera is used “as an instrument to contribute to a living memory,” and the photograph thus becomes an animate memory of a spent moment or a stage in life. Public photographs, to the contrary, serve to spread information removed from the entire authentic experience. “If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.”1 In the optics of Berger’s theory, a family photograph seems to be the most reliable mediator of the past. Since family photographs are almost exclusively used for private purposes (although even the term “purpose” is quite apparently inappropriate in this context) and the circumstances under which they were taken are shared – in most cases orally – among the family members and even among generations, they can be the living evidence of the past.2 In this, they fundamentally differ from the public photograph made by the media – because, according to Berger, a public photograph is removed from the context of personal experience both from the view of the photographer and the photographed person (for we usually do not and will never know either of them), and it is therefore “a dead object”.

Certainly, family photographs can evoke nostalgia. Their ability to testify about past things is often concealed under layers of emotions and even tears (not necessarily caused by our affection of our neighbours but also, for example, by hate). Authentic feelings, however, are exactly what the contemporary public photograph only rarely bears. Every single day, we see photographs of gory demonstrations and other bloodshed, of natural catastrophes and military conflicts, images of children dying of hunger or infectious and incurable diseases… – but hardly any of them makes it as far as to arouse our genuine, deep emotional thrill. We have become apathetic in the face of the enormous amount of photographs published in newspapers, magazines and on the internet, displayed at exhibitions and on posters. Even the most lacerating “pictures” begin to be perceived as pure information, as fact or, eventually, as an aestheticized version of the same. But even if we are looking at photographs of beautiful faces and perfect bodies, photographs of celebrities and famous politicians, our emotions, if we have any, are illusory – and, primarily, manipulated. Whether it is wonder, desire or envy, we are only reacting to someone who solely exists for us on paper or the screen.

While examining family photographs, we in fact do seek neither aesthetic qualities nor pure facts or objects of desire. We seek the stories of people who are close to us, and thus stories of our own. Not only stories about what happened somewhere once upon a time, but also about what the future may hide. A family photograph simultaneously brings the past back to life and touches upon the future. It is a medium which helps us search for the indications of what is to come. When I first saw the ultrasound image of our daughter (which today has become a certain kind of a family photograph as well), I simply wept. Those tears were not based on any sentimental recollection but on my exhilarating and at the same time nervous expectation. From the black spots, remotely reminiscent of a human young one, I tried to decipher her future face, her features and her first moments in this world. I perceived the view as a bridge to the future – equally as the first photograph of me was a bridge to the future for my parents. Family albums are visual stories about the past and the future. This is why people keep photographs and this is why almost every family creates its own photographic chronicle. This is also why my father, with his East-German made Altix camera, took photographs of his daughters almost obsessively: he wanted to preserve at least a fraction of what would otherwise perish, for us as well as for our daughters and their descendants. He wanted to record what happened between “then” and “now”, for future generations. I am sure that our children will look at those photographs with similar astonishment as I once did: “Is this really you?” “Was this girl your friend at school?” And they will think to themselves, how much older grandma has grown after all these years.

Families, too, have their photographic memory. Photographs are many times the only thing which the memory has left behind. But the memory’s gradual perdition today might be, paradoxically, contributed to by photography itself or, respectively, by photography in its digital form. Photos cease to be enlarged and printed; we burn and store them in the memory of our computers – which at the same time fundamentally transforms the character of a family archive. We have come to need an electronic mediator in order to look at digital pictures of our children. The worst thing imaginable would be if the pessimistic forecasts were to come true and, in some twenty or thirty years, computers were unable to read the photographs made today due to the rapid technological development of computer systems. In spite of technology, the family photographic memory would then cease to exist at all.

Martina Pachmanová