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Family Album
By Pedro Meyer It
was in 1940 that my mother took this picture of me standing there in
front of my father, Ernesto, both with our hands in our pockets; the
photograph had been in the family album for a long time when I recently
rediscovered it. Today, in addition to my first son Pablo, who is now
inching towards 40, I have a second son, Julio, who is 5 years old.
After seeing the picture in the album, I asked my wife Trisha to take
a picture of Julio and me in the same identical pose as that of my father
and me in that earlier image, standing in the park in Mexico City.
Too
many people associate computers and photography with the application
of filters to an image, which in essence almost never adds anything
but confusion to what more often than not, ends up being a poor picture.
Filters can be great tools, except when they are thrown at you with
an "in your face" attitude, leaving nothing to imagination or creativity.
In an era of instant food, instant almost anything, there is this fantasy
that one can also generate instant art. Simply by clicking on the filter
tool of choice which alters the image into an incoherent slap dash mess
of displaced pixels. The clicking on an endless array of available filters
in the absence of any critical thinking explains in part why nothing
more interesting is likely to emerge from such a process.
In
opposition to such mindless games, the computer allows us to explore
countless new possibilities in the realm of the imagination, and in
the exploration of time and place. Take for instance the seamless blending
of past and present into new images, which deliver yet new meanings
to those held individually by each portion of the whole.
The
exercise of going through a family album and looking at the past, is
for many of us not an easy experience. In part it has to do with revisiting
the image of loved ones that have passed away. In part it has to do
with the memory of moments we sometimes would like to forget. Or actually
wonderful moments that have long been gone and therefore miss them.
For one reason or the other, looking at old family pictures is usually
an emotional experience. For this very same reason, there is the potential
of coming up with some very powerful new work derived from recycling
past moments into new meanings.
Take
for instance the image of "fathers and sons" that I have posted here.
In this picture, I could very well be the father of my own father, as
the age difference between us would allow for such a consideration.
In that case, I would end up being my own grandfather, or for that matter,
my little Julio's great grandfather. But then there is also another
possible configuration: that of Julio and I being brothers. Julio, upon
looking at the picture, came up with yet another iteration, namely that
the image had been taken by both his mother and by his father's mother.
What we are contemplating in essence is the continuity of life between
generations, only that in this image the time line is not of the usual
linear kind due to my having had a child late in life. Such "cosmic
confusion," as my friend E Beardsley would call it, draws poignant attention
to what our usual expectations are. Never before have we been able to
make visual representations of such matters with greater ease as today.
Herein lies one of the more interesting fields of photographic exploration
that I can think of.
In
terms of psychology, I imagine that therapists could use this potent
new combination: photography and computers. The act of changing and
altering one's history through images, moving around and playing with
the positioning of partners, parents, children, siblings, and so on,
no doubt can offer new insights into our personal histories. From social
sciences to the political landscape, such alterations can also allow
us to revisit the past with new ideas and directions in light of the
present. Blending the past and the present is more than the idle notion
of cut and paste associated with the more linear time frames found in
previous artistic expressions. It is rather a more subtle and nuanced
delivery of a layered consciousness; a new awareness of how we perceive
facts and timelines and of how we deal with our present in relation
to past and future events.
A
few days ago I was working on a video interview with two ex-Jesuits
that I met some thirty years ago while photographing in a slum area
in Mexico City. I noticed how time had been compressed; their history
of three decades came down to a scant few hours of taping. Particularly
poignant was the revelation of one of them that at the time they all
thought their efforts to help people out in those slums was a failure.
So much so that he, upon leaving the Jesuit order out of frustration,
joined the Guerrilla movement in Central America. That did nothing either,
as he saw it then, in so far as improving the quality of life of those
for whom he was fighting. We sat talking in the very same area that
in the past did not have a single paved road, no electricity, water,
or sewage, no houses other than cardboard shacks. The interview was
being held in an apartment on the third floor of a very good building,
however modest, where before there had been nothing but the most abject
poverty. And we were arriving at a new perspective: that indeed a lot
had been changing all along, and for the better, only that no one had
had the patience to consider the long run (thirty years) to be an acceptable
time frame for social change, and therefore it had progressed for the
most part unnoticed. In the same way we are often unaware of day to
day changes in our next of kin.
All
of that is now open to new insights by looking at past and present within
the same frame.
I
strongly believe that if we continue to explore issues related to "time,"
and use photography and computers towards such a goal, we will discover
an unending array of new threads to our present lives, and in the process
create some exciting new images!
Pedro Meyer's photographs are found in the collections of more than 40 major museums throughout the world. He's also authored several books, including Los Cohetes Duraron Todo el Dia; Tempii di America; and Espejo de Espinas. His column appears each month in Camera Works.
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 ©Pedro Meyer 2001
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