A Reflection on My Family Albums

Looking through family photos – not so much albums, is kind of a fun thing my family likes to do. My parents were never too fust on keeping their photos in albums, so we have a big box full of photos still in their envelopes from after they were developed. Usually when my Brother and his wife, my sister and my parents and I are all together at home on the farm, we will go through the photos and laugh at good old times, picking bundles of photos at random, like a lucky dip, and passing them around the room.

Our family doesn’t really have many old family albums, as they are all still at my grandparents place or some of my aunties are keeping them safe.  Reading through the reading by Thomas Gainsborough has made me want to go and search through our old photos again, we do have a few albums from my Dads childhood, but I haven’t been able to access them because I live away from home and haven’t been back in a while.  I miss home.

I was talking to my Mum about old photos and the difference between how formal they were then, to the layed-back, goofiness of the photos people take today. We talked about they were  probably more formal back then  because photos were rare to come by, and a family might only have one of two family photos together. Whereas these days photos are extremely common, especially with the use of digital cameras.

A reaction to Bill Jay's "Past Perfect"

After reading Bill Jay’s “Past Perfect”, I would say that I completely agree with his arguments! History is what makes up the future, and as photographers, to be able to work creatively we need to be working with past and present.

History is one of the main subjects that I learnt about when studying photography in high school. It is what got me interested in photography in the first place. I loved looking at past photographer’s works, and the different techniques that developed how photographers work today. It is with the knowledge of the past that inspires my work of today.

The very last sentence of Jay’s reading says it all! “Every Photographer is Janus, The two-headed Roman God, who could not look forward without looking back”. This serves as inspiration for today, we too cannot move forward with our photography, without looking back on what has already been.

Old Family Photo

Shawn and I at 'Rock-View' 2004
Photographer: Brenda Bush

All my life I lived on a farm, until the start of the year when I moved here to Canberra for study.

As a kid I always remembered looking up to my older brother Shawn. I think this was mostly because when we were together we always found plenty of fun things to get up to, especially around the farm!

This is a photograph our mother took of the two of us, mucking around on the dam with an old boat Shawn found. The boat had holes in it and water would leak in while we were paddling around the dam, but that didn’t stop us.

Mum says that she thought it would be nice to get some photos of us while we were mucking around, but I think she just used that as an excuse to come with us, so she could make sure that we weren’t going to drown!  

The camera that was used would have been my Dads MINOLTA dynax 500si film camera with the 35-70mm lens; this was the main camera our family used to take photos. I think mum and dad liked to think it made them look professional!  To get the photo printed, mum would have taken the roll of film (most likely to be Kodak) into the Yass Doyle’s Pharmacy, where she always got her film processed. This would have taken a couple of hours, so she would have done her shopping and then picked the photos up afterwards.

I love this photograph, not for any visually dynamic reason, just the fact that it reminds me of the good times my brother and I had as kids, especially now that we both live out of home and don’t get to see each other very often.  It is a lovely memory to keep hold of.