Part 8

Souvenirs

The past is dangerously addictive. Nostalgia, especially second-hand nostalgia such as mine, often threatens to become an endless placebo in place of living. How alluring the past seems when we convince ourselves of having experienced it for a brief moment through culture and art.

The ghost story writer M.R. James lived with this addiction to the past more than most.

James famously spent his time surrounded by old manuscripts and religious imagery, cataloguing some of the biggest historical collections and immersing himself in theological visions of the past. From an early age, when he could only be consoled by an old Dutch Bible, to his prodigious achievement as an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge where he catalogued the university’s library of manuscripts, the past seemed more worthy of his time than the present.

This immersion explains why the characters who inhabit his eerie stories, written as a pastime for the initial distraction of his peers, share that same desire to be surrounded with the archaic and the old. We all on some level share this desire, even if it manifests in not quite so academic or eerie a manner.

The objects that inhabit James’ stories offer direct connections to the past, particularly when housing malevolent beings and creatures. It is easy to see how Polaroids can be seen as Jamesian objects. One story by James in particular understands the draw of looking into the past, speaking of the same feelings conjured by old Polaroids.

In 1925, the Cambridge and Eton Provost published A View from a Hill, a telling narrative in which an antiquarian sent to catalogue a private collection of manuscripts finds an unusual pair of binoculars. Fanshawe, the antiquarian, soon looks through them when out strolling the surrounding countryside, finding the landscape around him to not match the present reality when seen through the binoculars.

Trees are growing in greater proliferation, the hue of the land is different and the ruins of the nearby cathedral are far from ruinous but positively pristine. Such is the detail of this vision that Fanshawe is filled with giddy excitement at being able to explore this incredibly preserved religious building, having thought it decrepit and reclaimed by the soil.

The skulduggery that created this effect was due to an evil alchemist who used the boiled down bones of hanged men to augment the perception of the lenses. It is the period of these dead men that Fanshawe sees when he trains the binoculars onto the surrounding countryside, the bones that cured the lenses having been collected from a nearby gallows’ pole that once loomed ominously on the hill.

Polaroid cameras are not gifted with the boiled down bones of hanged men. But they do allow personalised windows onto the past. They render even the very recent past addictive to explore.

When coming across old Polaroid photographs, I understand Fanshawe’s giddiness. There is even a feeling of quiet intrusion: that such photos were, more likely than not, designed to only be viewed by a small group of people, perhaps even only a few individuals as a whole. These are private memorials. Yet, more often than not, they find themselves washed up on the stalls of fairs and car-boot sales. There are few images more melancholy than family photos heaped onto a table full of trinkets, curios and junk.

When a Polaroid is on a table at a junk fair, its creators are likely in the process of being forgotten. Their memories no longer have specific meaning to anyone. A Polaroid among a heap of trinkets is the end of the line, perhaps for us all.

One day, we too will be reduced to ephemera on a damp table in Deptford Market.

With so many strangers leaving behind trails of Polaroids, they naturally ask for stories. In 2015, a photographer and academic called Kyler Zeleny began to explore these possibilities through a popular and ongoing online project. He called it the Found Polaroid Project and its aim was quite simple: to narrate the lives of found Polaroids creatively and with public engagement.

Zeleny’s project has some crossover with my own arguments as to why Polaroids are so interesting. The ‘physicality’ of Polaroids ‘is intrinsic and is something we’ve come to romanticize in our era of digitized ownership’, he writes on the project’s website. Such objects ‘have an eerie way of taking us not only into a different time period but also into the intimate lives of complete strangers.’

To realise this journey into different times and perspectives, Zeleny relies on fiction. His website posits a number of Polaroids, often of everyday occurrences and celebrations, and invites contributors to explore the stories behind the photos. The result is intriguing, often effective, occasionally mawkish with misjudged sentiment, but enjoyable all the same.

When we look at Polaroids, whether our own or those of others, we similarly embellish and fictionalise the stories behind them. It is a natural effect of photography in general, though Polaroids have the advantage of inviting that sense of captioning simply via their design. A Polaroid of a pair of young boys riding a horse, for example gives rise to a story about eventual horse ownership on Zeleney’s website. As in this story, most of the miniatures written to accompany even the most banal of photographs on the site suggest reminiscence.

There is no escaping recollection in Polaroids. They deal heavily in poignancy. Equally, in a digital world, the choice to make something physical gives these moments greater credence than they were arguably afforded by the original photographers. In this case, the Polaroid of the horse-riding boys tells how such an activity allows, as its text suggests, ‘vivid emotions [to] flood back through me and for a second, I am a child again.’

Recollection, even if fictional, is further layered upon recollection.

In decades to come, it would not be surprising to find these fictions awarded genuine providence. As is so often the way, reality slips away leaving only the image. We are all natural storytellers and so coming into contact with a Polaroid, we veer into narrators because it is so easy to imagine how this object and its vision of the world slotted into the lives on show.

Roland Barthes questioned this to a degree though mostly cast its potential aside. ‘The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph)’, he writes in contrary to everything I believe. ‘The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.’ Photography becomes mere evidence in Barthes’ vision, one dictated by the stark reality of his own grief. His ideas were weighed down by a newly alien absence due to the death of his mother. No photo was ever going to bring her back.

A Polaroid restores through implication rather than literally bringing the past back to us, something many of the previous generation of thinkers insist on being too obvious a statement about photography. There clearly is, however, something Proustian about a Polaroid and its relationship to time. Eating the Madeleine did not literally call up Proust’s past, and neither do Polaroids. But it did act as a bridge towards it.

W.G. Sebald suggested something similar when discussing his own use of photographs in his novels. The inclusion of photos is ‘a preoccupation which, in a sense has no higher ambitions really than for a brief moment in time to rescue something out of that stream of history that keeps rushing past.’ Sebald was a master of reclamation, often convincing his readers that the characters in his books were actually those seen in photographs. To fool readers of his novel Austerlitz (2001), for example, a picture of an old, messy study was used as a setting for a Gothic London house rather than its real location: the office of a colleague in the modernist hanger of the Sainsbury Centre of the University of East Anglia campus.

This feeling of plucking moments from time and weaving stories around them happens when viewing Polaroids, never mind exploring them further as I do or as others do as in the Found Polaroids project. The object calls out to be acknowledged and fished out from time gushing by before the current pulls it away.

Let us drag some photos out of this slipstream and see what happens.

On a stay in Strasbourg, I was trawling the tables of its weekly fair on the main street in the centre of town. The photos found there were so potent that I ended up utilising many in a novel called How Pale the Winter Has Made Us. Others had a different appeal that I found little use for creatively because they seemed so self-contained. It was only in hindsight of looking through these random yet beautiful photos that it clicked that every single one was a Polaroid.

The Polaroids in question were not in open view on the seller’s table but contained in a battered envelope with a faded address on it. Why they were hidden from sight is still a mystery to me but equally adds a layer of intrigue to these seemingly ordinary photos. A number of aspects became clear, the chief being that these images contained an older time.

I love the eerie, empty photo of an anonymous building. Its uniform design, along with the other photos in the set, suggests it to be a hotel. People are absent. Its blue sky suggests somewhere sunny; not just the location of the photograph’s subject and its frozen moment, but where it was kept afterwards. It is deeply faded in parts, and its boarder is yellowed, verging on peeling away in some places. It was, in other words, an image kept in sight.

No one was left to consider this Polaroid and the others with it, except the seller. Only its vague monetary value kept them from precariously crossing that fine line between curio and detritus.

Memory in this Polaroid is not just that of the photographer and the curiosity they felt in documenting such car-park calm. It suggests the whole world around it in ways difficult to describe, arguably because we can imagine roughly the world in which such a photograph would continue.

History is static in a Polaroid and the everyday is alluring in all of its bland yet lost detail.

This feeling of ordinariness is realised beautifully in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, even if the photograph used to illustrate the point is not a typical Polaroid. It has the right palette but not the right format. Either way, the effect clearly desired is that it looks like an instant photograph of some form.

The moment occurs in the same scene mentioned earlier when Deckard confronts Rachel about her unreal memories. Deckard recounts memories that she thought only she knew, one about watching a spider get eaten by its offspring in a web. Deckard knows this memory and his awareness of it, having been supplanted in Rachel from the niece of the head of the company who created replicants, is evidence enough that her life is a lie. Her perception of the past is false.

We all become replicants when we look at Polaroids. It is in this moment that Scott shows a photograph.

The photo for Rachel is undeniable evidence of her past, being of her mother and her many years ago. An unspoken element in the scene is how much more effective as evidence the analogue photo is in the futuristic world of the film. How can this be a lie when the grain of the photo and the time that is has since passed is so clear to see?

Deckard reveals the truth behind the delusion; the photo is real, it’s just that Rachel is not. This past is real, as are her deeply held secrets and memories, but they are not hers. Her whole past is a lie and the realisation of this leads her to flee the room, emotionally overwrought in a disturbingly human way. The shock feels like a fantastical cousin to dementia, where memories are undermined rather than lost.

After she has left, Deckard looks at the photograph and for a moment something strange happens. The Polaroid becomes animated. We see the shadows of the branches moving momentarily in the sunlight. Voices of children playing in the garden float on the air, and the even the clothes of the occupants of the photo seem to move in the breeze.

It is difficult to gauge precisely what happens here and there is much debate as to what this signifies, if anything. We know that photos have unusual properties in the film as Deckard soon wanders through the detail of another photograph searching for clues in his search for the fugitive replicants.

Yet, there is something more casual and unnecessary about this animated photo that feels less to do with what is happening in the narrative and instead about conveying the power of the memories they contain. It is telling that Deckard seems little interested in the fact that the Polaroid has just animated before his eyes. This is a scenario coined for questioning the viewer rather than the character.

When Scott films the photograph moving, he is possibly showing what Deckard reads into the photograph rather than what he actually sees. He sees what, until a few moments before, Rachel saw pleasurably in this photo. Her reality was one that moved and was real, her memories as legitimate as anyone else’s; the photo animating this moment within her. The Polaroid here is showing what Deckard has just callously taken away. Rachel’s sense of being was just an illusion. Now she is a stranger in her own memories.

She is an anachronism within her own history.

In spite of suggesting there to be nothing Proustian about photography, Barthes actually looks to Proust when describing the feeling of looking at photos of people, especially loved ones such as in Rachel’s Polaroid. He quotes Proust as showing that the charge of such photographs is due to ‘of a being before which one recalls less of that being than by merely thinking of him or her’.

Because they were there, Polaroids are touched by time. Even if totally alien experiences are shown in the square of the image, like my found Polaroids in the envelope, I quickly feel them animate in spite of not having experienced their moments. Such is the power of this feeling that I sometimes feel that things are moving in Polaroids when I turn away. Looking back jolts everything back to illusionary stillness.

Imagine for a moment holding the Polaroid of the flats after it had developed. By placing yourself within this half-imagined vision, viewing the Polaroid becomes a highly charged act of time travel. Feel the sun glinting off those windows of the complex, the texture of the paint of the garages as it peels and flakes to the touch, the strange flapping sound of the damp towels drying on the balconies. Perhaps there is a pool on the other side of this complex; we can hear splashing and cries. There is movement and light and change, perhaps more so when our eyes are averted. But something living is there and that feeling is derived from just how tangible the past is when perceived in a Polaroid.

It detonates histories, real and imagined.

The past comes freshly preserved in the grain.

Before the digital revolution, these Polaroid pasts were far more telling, simply because there was little bias as to what was captured for posterity due to the ease of use. It is one of the advantages carried over to handheld digital photography; though future historians are likely to be flooded with documentation to such a degree that it will likely be difficult to consider our ongoing digital moment as mysterious.

In today’s climate, Polaroids feel archaic. Because of this, they fit into Mark Fisher’s idea of the weird. They feel out of place in the digital world, something that should not be here, and so their subjects ask for greater attention.

Part 10 coming soon.