a look through time

One afternoon, quite a wee while ago, I was down at my parents' house when my aunt popped in for a visit.
"Have you seen the Tele?" she asked.
Once a week it published an old photo of the Inverclyde area. That day's edition had a photo taken in 1930 of Hamilton Street in Greenock. She showed it to my dad.
"Look at the bottom right.."
There, crossing the road, was their grandparents: my great-grandparents whom I'd never met (see extras). They had been captured - quite by accident - going about their daily business and about to cross the road when the shutter opened. Chance, or curiosity, has them looking towards where the photograph is being taken from. Which gives the slightly unnerving sensation of them looking directly through time at us, at me.

I think a lot about this instance captured. This split second snatched from the abyss of time past. It seems more potent because it is a fortuitous coming together of events..

- my great-grandparents in their good gear and bunnets out and about when the photograph was taken
- that they are looking in our direction
- that the photograph was kept and survived
- that it found its way to the local paper
- that my aunt managed to spot them, where easily she could have had a quick look and they would have remained hidden and obscure in this snapshot of time.

The photo seems all the more precious because of the chances that I should never have been able to have my great grandparents looking straight at me from the street and time where they lived.

( I've not really got much to say about it other than it brought to mind the programme Shooting The Past by Stephen Poliakoff where a developer buys a warehouse containing millions of photographs. There is a curator there and he is able to find and connect stories of incidental, everyday people throughout the vast collection and piece them together and reclaim these seemingly unimportant people from the past. I won't spoil the story incase anyone hasn't seen it (it's worth watching). )

And their look is part of my story, my looking is part of our story. It punctuates my sense of who I am and where I am bound. How is it that I connect with their regard? What traces is there of them in me, right now this instance? That is what this 85 year stare smuggled through the impossibilities of time and space asks of me.

And so this thought is another captured instance. It arises and is recorded here. It is temporal. Are my great-grandchildren reading this? Who are you and where are you bound? Yes: I'm looking at you.