Photos Define A Person - pt. 1
For a long time, I believed there were no photos from me living in children's homes. Here is my complicated journey on attempting to track some down.
I screamed in lowercase: “i have no photos from my childhood.” To me this is normal, but for the BBC journalist doing a feature on me, it was impossible.
“There must be one,” he said.
“Nope,” I replied. “I don’t have any. I grew up in care. In children’s homes. Photos weren’t really a thing. No one really cared about that stuff.” It didn’t matter how many times or what formation of this answer I gave; he refused to believe me. But after several sympathetic email niceties, he went on to say,
“Surely you can just get in touch with your family and get one?” I screamed in lowercase,
“Thanks for your help. I grew up in care. It’s not that simple.”
I’ve always had a problematic relationship with photographs. I have an equally deep interest and disinterest in them. I love the art of photography but I struggle with the sentimentality of photographs. Photos are the symbol of the things we care deepest about. We take photos of moments we care about. We keep photos of memories we care about. We share photos to show people who we care about and what we care about. So, maybe it isn’t surprising that I had no photos of my childhood. But was it because no one cared, or was it because I did not care about that time of my life?
I have read somewhere that photos define a person. And if this is the case, I didn’t exist before I was sixteen, until I left the Isle of Man and its children’s homes forever. I grew up in the age of the disposable photo, the deletable image, the throwaway memories, and in that move, I erased my childhood without a second thought.
When I left the island, I drank the clichéd working-class Cool-Aid of a fresh start. I can still feel the wet sea salt sprinkle my face as I watched my childhood dissolve into the horizon. But the tingling sensation of relief quickly turned into a shudder of dread as I realised I didn’t want the shadow of that life to follow me. This separation was a chance for a new shadow. Or at least I wanted people to see a different one. Not the scrawny little bastard with a chavvy hair style. Not the track suits and white trainers. I wanted to be a normal kid.
Photography is about light. Having no photos plunged my childhood into a dark age. As much as the BBC journalist frustrated me with his lack of empathy towards my situation, he ignited something in me that hadn’t been there before. I didn’t know why, but having some photos of my childhood felt necessary.
I wasn’t lying to the journalist when I told him photos weren’t really a thing in children’s homes because they weren’t. For most of the time I lived in them, and I aimed to spend as little time inside them. I was sure no photos existed from that time. It had been over ten years since I left. To prove myself wrong, I would go on long walks to forage the deepest, darkest, densest, overgrown parts of my memory, desperately searching.
Each search led me to a void, a wall of infinite blackness so profound that I sometimes doubted whether I could find a way back.
Little sparks occasionally flashed: memories of photos being taken. Grainy A4 printouts of pictures taken from a care worker’s phone when they took me and my brother to Blackpool for a weekend as part of transitioning to a new children’s home. They were pinned up in the kitchen. Some photos did exist. People didn’t really know how to store photos back then. That trip was in April 2007, before the iPhone or the iCloud or anything now that allows us to keep photos we forget about. This is a starting point.
On further walks, I wrested, wondering whether I wanted to pursue this. Was it worth it? Was I ready? What am I even doing this for? I walked away from that life for a reason. Sentimentality was never something I had learnt. It’s hard to grow an attachment to things when anything you are attached to would disappear at some point. Without realising it, I had embodied Dory’s mantra of ‘just keep swimming’.
Getting any photos would take me to a place I’m not sure I wanted to go again. It would never be as simple as firing up an old hard drive or dusting off an old box. I would have to contact people and services.
I obtained my care files from Social Services. Out of the 15,000 PDFs, out of the tonnes of images of handwritten notes, not a single photograph. More memories flashed by: celebration evenings. I firmly remember being shown the photos by a staff member on their email after one. They looked professional. Someone must still have them?
Luckily, I was still in contact with that staff member. I got in touch. She couldn’t help and told me of a policy that came in shortly after I left. I screamed in lowercase: thanks for the help.
I went back to Social Services and asked them to look again. Still nothing. I screamed in lowercase: thanks for the help.
I got in touch with the care provider. Still nothing. I pushed back on what their policies were on this, and that I had firm memories of photos being taken and shared. All they replied was, two months after I left, a policy came giving each house a camera and all the photos would be achieved. I screamed in lowercase: thanks for the help.
It’s not that simple. That’s what I told the journalist. Why, a year after the feature was published, am I pursuing this? Setbacks are unavoidable. But giving up is unforgivable. This wasn’t a round of Mastermind, ‘I’ve started, so I’ll finish’. Sometimes, my brain obsesses. Things I resist tend to persist. Maybe I was just fed up with not being able to join in when people shared the parts they cared about from their childhood?
The original spark. The memory of the Blackpool photos in the kitchen. That care worker was into saving things. We used to share MP3s with each other. Is it possible he just might still have copies of those photos? I’ve tried to connect with him before, but he has always ignored me. I get it. People move on with their lives. This was one last shot in the dark. My fingers let out an exhausted sigh after tapping out another cold-calling email, desperately hoping this one would get back to me.
Nothing. Weeks of empty plastic bags tumbled past.
An email landed in my inbox.
These were the photos. My brain puked verbally incontinent remarks while my fingers trembled over the trackpad. Now I had them. Did I actually want to see them? Some things can’t be unseen. The photos would take me back to a place I wasn’t sure I was ready to go. I closed the email.
Maybe the reason I didn’t want any childhood photos is because I didn’t want to understand what my childhood meant? I would have to confront this eventually. I reopened the email.
I screamed in lowercase: thanks for your help.
Part 2 to follow.
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