’Art & soul
Faces lost in time

Frozen moments shape our own histories, says B. N. Goswamy as he analyses an old photo album 

Phil Coomes on BBC — Viewfinder

I was reading something on old photographs the other day when my mind travelled back towards what a student of mine had presented me years ago when I was teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. If I recall aright, I had been speaking on the beginnings of modern art movements in Europe in the third quarter of the 19th century, and had gone at some length into the impact that the coming of photography had on the art of painting then. How things began to change under that impact, and how differently did different painters respond to the new challenge — or new opportunities — that this technological intrusion presented.

At the semester-end get together that year, one of the students came with a farewell gift for me: an old photo album, about two inches in thickness but in its length and breadth the size of a pocketbook. It had a precious look: neat, very decorative, hand-tooled leather covers, with metal snap fastenings at the sides. A little taken aback at the kind gesture first, I began to turn the leaves of the album and found it filled with portraits, each neatly ensconced inside finely cut window mounts: a whole range of them. The thought that this student was parting with a family heirloom made me uncomfortable, and I asked her to tell me more about the album. "No, it does not relate to our family", she said reassuringly, thus wearing my resistance down. "My father had picked it up in a flea-market some time back, and it was just lying around at home." She thought it would interest me since I had been speaking of old photographs in my lectures. It did, of course. Gratefully, if a little brazenly, I accepted the thoughtful gift.

The album travelled back with me — naturally — to India. But then, I am embarrassed to admit, it got lost in the unkempt piles of books that I keep struggling with at home. Suddenly, however, it showed up the other day and I began to browse through it with renewed interest. The binding needed a little attention and I had it repaired. (The binder mentioned to me, incidentally, that as the album lay around in his workshop, many visitors were intrigued by it: more by the binding with its metal fasteners and gold edging of leaves than with its contents, I suspect.) But it was the contents that arrested me all over again. Carefully, very carefully, the professional and now forgotten maker of the album — Roberts Brothers of Boston — had joined together fine, cardboard thick leaves, both front and back featuring a neatly rimmed window with a circular arch at the top. Inside all these slots or spaces were portraits, some fading, others still sharp: men and women, young and old, mostly formally dressed: men with erect military bearing; stern-looking women who must have presided over family dinners once; scrubbed youthful faces filled with hope; timid young ladies hesitantly lingering at the threshold of youth.

One could see fashion and studied casualness, the will to take the world head on and the desire to retreat from it all. Each face was like a window that opened upon the past. My guess is that the album dated back to the times of the American Civil War, or a little before that which would take it into the middle of the 19th century.

One does not know what all these people who were sharing this album had in common, but related they must have been in one manner or the other. There were no notings, no captions to the photographs, which offered any help. On the cover of the album were printed in now fading gold, the words: "A.E. Kelly", suggesting that it might have been an album of the Kelly family. Only two leaves bore brief pencilled notes, one showing a young woman with a little girl lovingly held in the crook of her arm and inscribed "Mrs. John Patton with Mary, Albany", and the other of a middle aged man jauntily sporting a torn suit and hat — obviously taken at a fancy dress party — inscribed "John Patton".

A neatly folded press clipping, yellow with age, was inside the album, tracing the career of John Patton who, born in Ireland, had moved to England and first settled in Albany, NY, where he married Eliza Anderson in 1843. He moved later to Detroit where he served as the mayor of the city but, if the photograph of Mrs. John Patton with her little daughter, mentioning Albany as the place where it was taken, is any indication, it cannot have been much older than 1850 or so.

In and by itself, this particular album of family photos is unlikely to be of great interest to any of us here. Why, one might ask, should anyone, in fact, other than members of that family, be interested in this group of pictures, or this kind of album: personal pictures so out of context?

The answer is that because it is in the nature of our contract with time. To engage with the past is also to engage with the future in some ways. Frozen moments play an important part in shaping our own histories and can over time begin to shape our memories. Records like these, as any historian will tell you, make us connect to the past, help us relive who we were. Memories might fade but, as someone said, things like these "can last for a long time capturing a single moment in all of eternity", allowing us at the same time "a visit to times and places unknown."

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