The Oxford anthropologist, Elizabeth Edwards, who has worked on the interface between photography and anthropology, likens photographs to “surrogate memory”, and asks whether photographs are “intentionally hidden (in lockets, wallets, diaries, family bibles), where and why?” Such choices matter; in the case of family photographs, what are enlarged, framed and put on public view and those that remain in “small private worlds” — or are even abandoned, thrown into the waste-paper basket — depend on what the owner/s wish to remember, memorialize.
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The walls of homes become spaces where a narrative is worked out not only with photographs but also with trophies of shikar, clocks, plaques and so on. In this visual of a Thalessary home, a venerable ancestor is flanked by mounts of two well-polished buffalo heads and horns. The photograph of the middle-aged man in a suit and tie is hung from the bevelling on the wall and touches the wooden ceiling well above eye-level. Clearly, it is supposed to be seen — but not looked at closely. The more recent photographs are at a lower level, there to be examined. The buffalo heads would indicate a family that had, at some stage, known a style of life that included shikar. And the sartorial style of the gentleman, a certain status. Both the photograph and the mounts are integral to the public face of the family; their display around the daunting old-fashioned bars of the window would indicate an old family home — where, however, members have little interest in replacing them with something more elegant and contemporary. In another home, an entire wall is devoted to a framed print of “HRH Prince of Wales” from Pears’ Annual of 1920 while other adjacent spaces are packed with family photographs.
An interesting piece; take a look!
PS: At our home, the pride of place goes to two photographs of Nehru (from Illustrated weekly — with four lines of Frost’s The woods are lovely below — was the photographer Jitendra Arya? Probably); and, in between the two is a photograph of my grandparents!
