WRITERS PRIZE: 21 / JAN / 2025
YOUR LITTLE SCATTERED ARCHIVE
by Tess Little
It was my mother who found the photograph. She was searching for my writing when she encountered the Amazon listing: Vintage photo of Tess Little and Alice Hobbis busy in the sand.
For $29.00 (plus $9.99 shipping) you could purchase a photograph of Tess and Alice, aged four or five, digging with plastic spades. The picture was listed as an ‘original collectible’, ‘over forty years old’, though anyone who studied it could recognise the cartoon gloss of the nineties. The era is there in Alice’s Little Mermaid sweater, in the primary colour palette, the crisp contrast of sunlight dimpling sand.
The seller, a company called PickYourImage, would post the purchase from Latvia. Elsewhere, they called themselves Icelandic. I had grown up in Norwich and had never visited either country. But not only did this company have my likeness, they had my name too. And something in their language was especially disconcerting: busy in the sand. Words an adult might use of a child, affectionately. My mother was unnerved, I was unnerved, and so, when I informed her, was my childhood best friend Alice.
The mystery was swiftly solved. PickYourImage is a retail arm of IMS Vintage Photos, a Swedish agency that digitises newspaper photo archives for free—in return, newspapers let them sell original prints. Newspapers preserve their sprawling archives, PickYourImage makes money, and customers can, according to Amazon, own ‘a piece of history’.
In the nineties my mother worked at the Eastern Daily Press. My siblings and I often appeared in its pages on free days out. Tess Little busy in the sand must have been taken on one such occasion— those were probably my mother’s words captioning, with the picture accompanying a review. Knowing this, I guessed the location: Playbarn, a farm-based attraction in Norfolk. A quick browse confirmed it. Other photos appeared online of the same scene at the same indoor sandpit—other children captured by other mothers, decades later.
IMS had recently partnered with Archant, the EDP’s publisher, which meant that all those pictures from my childhood—at the opening of a Norwich cinema, modelling dungarees from local department store Jarrolds—could now be sold as fragments of history. I was a fragment of history.
Strange that this should feel so alien when I use other people’s images in my own historical research. A few years before discovering busy in the sand, I’d been working on the French Liberation. I was investigating the vigilante punishment of women who allegedly collaborated with German occupiers: all over France, in a ritual humiliation, their heads were publicly shaved. Written records were scarce. My main sources were photographs—either taken as part of the punishment, or captured by military photographers—archived at the Imperial War Museum.
One French contact put me in touch with a woman whose mother had recently died. While she was sorting through the attic, she’d discovered a box of photographs. There was her mother, aged nineteen, bald—a shorn woman. For decades this secret had remained hidden. The daughter showed me these pictures, and the story of her mother’s shame became a fragment of the history I was writing.
Over the years, I’ve sifted through many such fragments: folders of Soviet-era erasures stored at the International Herald Tribune, snapshots of feminist street-theatre in a Mumbai archive, boxes of fading wedding portraits on Spanish market stalls. I had always known that I am (that I was, will become) a historical character like those I study. But I hadn’t felt it until I saw Tess Little busy in the sand, so clearly a remnant from another decade. One part of the vast, disparate archive of my life—online and in attics and Latvian warehouses, maybe in strangers’ homes if other pictures of me sold.
I told PickYourImage the photograph was only twenty years old, and they removed the listing. They have thousands more online. Almost all seem more historically significant than a photo of a small child playing in the sand. A man training wild horses; wartime telephone operators; actresses backstage before a show. Then again, each depicts everyday experience—and who can say which fragments of your scattered archive will mean something to someone else, some day.
Images: from 'Photographic Survey of the Smithsonian' by Thomas Smillie, 1890 (top), 1890 (middle), 1913 (bottom)
Your Little Scattered Archive was shortlisted for the Source prize for new writing about photography in 2024.
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