WRITERS PRIZE: 20 / JAN / 2025
SHOEBOX
by Martin Raymond
This is about the heft of a shoebox filled with photographs printed on paper. The physicality of images.
It is also about the stillness of the house of the recently dead. The empty chair with the cushions crushed. The crossword half done, the slippers neatly parked, the TV remote still to hand.
We were the executors, with the sad business of emptying the house.
The house belonged to my Uncle John, a remarkable man who left school at fourteen for an engineering apprenticeship, did his national service in Germany in 1948, witnessed the Berlin Airlift, married my mother’s sister, moved into sales at GEC, travelled the world, was an active trade unionist and historian of the labour movement, completed his PhD at the age of 79, wrote scholarly articles in his eighties and lived in this same house in Manchester for nearly sixty years. He had no family but left behind his scholarship, a wide network of friends and relatives. And his photographs.
Most were in the shoebox, but there were digital images too. My Uncle was an early adopter - I went to him with computing questions. He had already consigned his digital equipment, complete with photographs, to friends and neighbours. An earlier technology, his collection of transparencies, was somewhere. I knew the slides would be immaculately filed and labelled. The shoebox was the opposite. Tiny square 1940’s prints, professional black and white captures of long-gone corporate dances, weddings, birthdays, confirmations, the colours of the 1970s photos more distinctive than the haircuts and ties. Plus all the graduations - he had three after the age of sixty. There was no order, no captions, no chronology, all of his life came tumbling out of the shoebox onto the sofa.
Barthes takes all of the fun out of old photographs. All the people are dead, or will be soon, and that knowledge reminds us, the innocent viewers, that we too are destined for the dark. Nothing deepens the Barthesian gloom like the existential twist of finding oneself as the sole survivor of a group photograph. In photo after photo from the 1960s - his wedding and annual trips to visit his wife’s family in Scotland - I am the only one still alive, a grumpy toddler survivor. No one else is of an age where they could possibly have made it this far. The empty house was cold, but felt colder.
If the presence of the dead was chilling, the photographs of absence - the vacant landscapes and gardens - have the even eerier emptiness of arrested time. There was a photograph of his house - interesting only because it hadn’t changed one bit. More emotional was the same house, blurred and background, with my uncle and aunt - fresh homeowners - hugging each other at the front door. Unless you’re Ed Rucha, photographs without people are dead photographs. With some exceptions. There was a tiny black and white picture of my grandparent’s cottage garden. It’s lush with growth, blackcurrant bushes, elephant ears of rhubarb, but it’s not the expansive territory I remember as a small boy. The past is smaller than you think. Small as a shoebox.
But, even so, we couldn’t keep them all. My fellow executor was 86 - she had enough shoeboxes of her own. In the end we went through them like a pack of cards sorted into a pile for her, a pile for me and one for the house clearers. I dealt at high speed. If there was no one we recognised - even vaguely - they went into the void.
We felt them go through our fingers, just as we measured the weight of those lost afternoons and evenings when we picked up the shoebox. Digital files wouldn’t have given us that. They’d have appeared in the pixilated ether - floating away from us - there and gone. As we made our choices that morning in the silent house, we could touch the past as it flicked through our fingers. The collection of slides were somewhere. We didn’t try too hard to find them. We’d had enough.
Shoebox was shortlisted for the Source prize for new writing about photography in 2024.
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