memories\sand_drift\*.*

A while ago I discussed a purposely blurred image of a ditch with a colleague. The image didn't do much for me, but my colleague was intrigued. It reminded him of his boyhood years, when he sometimes lay flat on his belly in the meadows to watch little critters swarming about in the ditches.

That set me thinking about how a photograph can stir up memories - is it possible to reverse this? What does a memory actually look like, and is it possible to capture that image?

I went to a sand drift in the Dutch province of Drenthe with my wife and our boys, aged four and six, as one does on a sunny Sunday afternoon. As we did forty years ago when I was their age. Images in my mind of those Sunday afternoons are blurry, but that's exactly what I'm looking for - images of memories.

After forty-odd years, such images are blurry almost by definition. What did our dog look like? I remember a black blur. What did my sister look like? I only see ponytails. The weather was nice. But what did the trees look like? And was my father there with us? Or is that man that I see my grandfather?

And if there is such a thing as a collective memory, what do memories of other people look like? There are bound to be people of my age that have similar memories of such Sunday afternoons. Would they recognise the images in this series? And how will my boys remember this afternoon forty years from now?

This series is an opening move. Memories are categorised in my head in folders, as if they were stored in a computer. There are of course other folders, with images of nursery school, the province of Friesland where I grew up, of my grandparents' farm. Me, safely hiding behind my mother's back on her bicycle. Perhaps someday all of these images will be recorded. To be continued.

Gerard Kingma
November 2005

All pictures on the index page were shot with a Canon Powershot Pro1  digicam. Motion was created with the camera, not with the computer.