Exercise – Recreate a Childhood Memory

Recreate a childhood memory in a photograph. Think carefully about the memory you choose and how you’ll recreate it. You’re free to approach this task in any way you wish. • Does the memory involve you directly or is it something you witnessed? • Will you include your adult self in the image (for example, to ‘stand in’ for your childhood self ) or will you ask a model to represent you? Or will you be absent from the image altogether? (You’ll look at the work of some artists who have chosen to depict some aspect of their life without including themselves in the image in the next project.) • Will you try and recreate the memory literally or will you represent it in a more metaphorical way, as you did in Part Two? • Will you accompany your image with some text? • In your learning log, reflect on the final outcome. How does the photograph resemble your memory? Is it different from what you expected? What does it communicate to the viewer? How? It might be interesting to show your photograph to friends or family members – perhaps someone who was there at the time and someone who wasn’t – and see what the image conveys to them.

One of the problems of living a very long way from your hometown is you don’t have access to family photographs very readily or do you have access to family members to recreate scenes if you so wish. Especially, went your already small family is already vastly diminished.

I thought long and hard about this project and I was initially very stumped – As I think I have mentioned in the previous post I’m a very shy and reserved person and unfortunately, this was the same as a kid. As a result, I was never one for large groups of friends at school, and I spent a lot of my time with either my own company or with my parents and maternal grandparents. Both my grandparents and mum have sadly passed away so even if I in the UK creating an xx years later shot of an existing memory would be possible. So I have created an imagre based a vague memory that I have of a photo me swinging between my grandad and perhaps mum or grandma on a family holiday in Blackpool when I was very young.

I recreated the image using HO scale (1:87) model figures because these hold a key memory for me as a child. For many years I built with grandad a model railway, and one day i hope to rebuild it with a child of my own (who am I kidding, I’ll be rebuilding it kids or not).

The image above is not an exact representation of the image – actually I’m unsure I could even track it down these days if it even still exists, but the image contains all the information my brain needs to actually bring a tear to my eye.

Obviously, I’m the little boy the red hair gives it away, my grandad away wore a suit, even to the beach, I want the memory to be of my swinging between my mum and grandad, and the figure reminds me of my mum, immaculately dressed, however, my mum was blonde and my grandma dark haired so the dark represents my grandma. The photographer is my Dad. The sand represents the seaside of my all my childhood holidays we taken.

I know in my heart that this a constructed image, a combination of memories thrown into a pot but the more I look at it the more I can imagine the day, and I’m going to print it and hang it on the wall.

PostScript

One of the other things the exercise asks us to do is to show the image to family members who would have been there to witness the memory. I did wonder if someone knew what I doing would their impression of the image to tainted? Does knowing what an intention is, affect the viewer’s interpretation of an image? I think it may do. So unannounced I send the image to my Dad via WhatsApp, he had no I idea about the project I was working on. His response was “Looks familiar”; I think I can take it I have succeeded in whatIi intended.