Shortly after my mother died at the age of 88, I took a large portrait photograph of her to be framed. It had been lying about neglected among her possessions for many years and had been slightly damaged on one corner. The framer did an excellent job, cutting diagonals at the inner corners of the mat so that the damaged part would hardly be noticeable. After I brought it home and put it up on the wall, the photograph began to evolve, or rather, through it, my recollection of my mother began to evolve. The portrait did not age like the portrait in Oscar Wilde's novel, but my perception of her went from being as she had been when she died – frail, bent, wrinkled and grey-haired, to as she appeared in the photograph – young, indeed younger that I could have recalled in reality, for the portrait was taken a good decade before I was born.
Photographs enable us to reach back into the past, and make the past not only seem, but actually be real. For a photograph, unless it has been tampered with, does not lie. No one has put it better that Roland Barthes, who, on examining a photograph of Polish soldiers taken in 1915 noted that what he observed was not a memory, nor an imagination, but reality, 'reality in a past state' (Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, London, 1981, p. 82). It does not, he wrote, 'restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance)' but attest 'that what I see has indeed existed.'
A deep personal connection makes my mother's photograph easy for me to emotionally relate to, and to regard as real (sometimes she seems to be coming right out of the frame). I do not undergo quite the same intensity of emotion when looking an any photograph, for example at the small and faded photograph below that shows my great aunt Laura and her younger sister Doris. You can get a sense of how old the picture is by the costumes, and though I do vaguely recall aunty Laura's 77th birthday in January 1963, I don't really remember anything else about her. However, this flimsy, battered and faded piece of celluloid is nonetheless, for all its fragility, a real fragment of the past, and I almost find myself smiling back at Doris, as if I am there, as if I am working the camera.
Not only does a photograph enable us to observe a past reality. In its details it exposes truths that we could not otherwise have known. That is why, if one wishes to recreate something not personally experienced, to write about people one has not personally known and have what one has written seem real, photographs can be very effective aids. In his poem Six Young Men, the English poet, Ted Hughes, describes a photograph of friends of his father, and through his description, through a few brief details portrays the six young men who are shown on it, six young men who would serve and die in the First World War. With their 'celluloid smiles', in their old-fashioned cocked hats and shiny shoes, they became alive to the poet in spite of his never having met them (he was born in 1930), and in spite of they being 'four decades under ground,' and through his poem they become alive to us, even if we have not even seen the photograph. And because the photograph can revive these men, through his description the poet can revive their fate, in all its horror and pity, and waste.
In attempting to get in the right state of mind to write a story set in the First World War, I spent a great deal of time closely examining hundreds of photographs of soldiers. What was I looking for? I was trying to open a door into the past and to connect intimately with these people whom I had never met. Indeed, I found myself often deeply moved by simple things, by the way they posed for the photographer, by the expressions on their faces, all the while aware in the back of my mind that whether or not they survived the war, they were all certainly now many years under ground. Group photographs of friends, and studio photographs of single soldiers and brothers in uniform, taken before they enlisted or while on leave, were highly popular in the First World War. The reason was certainly an awareness that many of them would not return. I recall reading somewhere that the official cameramen sent out to film on the battlefields, made an effort to catch the momentary attention of the soldiers they were filming, so that perhaps their families might see them in the cinema, see their faces and have something to cling to.
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