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
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