Amateur Photographer – 20 July 2019

12 20 July 2019 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I subscribe 0330 333 1113

We need to take responsibility for our

photographs while we can, to avoid those

left behind having to do all the work

View point

Ailsa McWhinnie

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O

f all the things I expected

to wake up to on 1 January

this year, it wasn’t the news

that my late grandparents’

possessions had gone up in smoke. At

around 7.45pm the night before, a fi re

broke out at the Shurgard storage facility

in Purley Way, south London. By the early

hours of New Year’s Day, the entire

building – which housed 1,198 rented units

• had been razed to the ground. Nothing
  was salvaged. We were luckier than many.
  Some lost every last belonging; others
  their livelihoods.
  My grandfather died in 1995, and my
  grandmother (or, to be more accurate,
  my step-grandmother) continued living
  in their fl at until 2016, when dementia
  meant she had to move into a nursing
  home. Not long after this, we sold the
  property, and my sister and I were
  tasked with sorting through two
  lifetimes’ worth of belongings. However,
  despite a long and respected career
  in politics, my grandmother had
  surprisingly few mementos of it. My
  grandfather had been a wonderful artist.
  Fortunately, over the years, a number of
  his paintings had been distributed around
  our small family. But it’s the two self-
  portraits, which were in the storage unit,
  that I will miss the most.

Tackling the prints

While my sister and I found ourselves

capable of being reasonably dispassionate

about what would go into the Shurgard

unit and what would go to house

clearance once we’d packed up the fl at,

it was the photographs that proved

paralysing. Early on in the fi rst day, I set

aside a small bundle of black & white

prints, which I took home to scan. These

formed only a tiny portion of what was to

come. Shortly after, we uncovered boxes

and boxes and boxes of prints that we

simply didn’t know what to do with.

Not to mention the hundreds of small,

rectangular plastic containers that housed

thousands of 35mm colour slides. We

opened one or two of them, but no more.

Overwhelmed by this point, we added it

all to the pile of items for the removal

men to take to the storage unit. We’d

deal with them ‘one day’.

But it wasn’t our job to deal with them. It

should have been up to my grandparents.

Why hadn’t they sorted through the prints

and slides, kept a handful that were

meaningful, put them in an album and

ditched the rest? I was left asking myself

how much these pictures had actually

meant to them. And if they didn’t mean

anything to them, why should they mean

anything to us? It may sound brutal, but

living – as my sister, mother and I all do

• in small fl ats, we aren’t in a position
  to keep stuff simply because the people
  those things belonged to are now gone.
  So my message is this. If you have
  decades’ worth of disorganised
  photographs, go through them. Keep
  perhaps 1%, and chuck the rest. Because,
  should the unthinkable happen, and your
  offspring end up losing almost every
  one of those unsorted, unloved prints in
  deeply unpleasant circumstances, you
  might fi nd their reaction is not one of
  grief, but relief.

‘If you have decades’

worth of disorganised

photos, go through them’

Ailsa’s grandfather (centre) in an unnamed

(and surreal) play from the 1930s. One of

only a few photos that didn’t go into storage

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS COLUMN ARE NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER MAGA ZINE OR TI MEDIA LIMITED

© AILSA MCWHINNIE

Ailsa McWhinnie has worked in photography

magazines for more than 25 years. She is one of

Amateur Photographer’s features editors.

© JAMES ABBOTT

CONTENT FOR NEXT WEEK’S ISSUE MAY BE SUBJECT TO CHANGE

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In next week’s issue

On sale Tuesday 23 July