In the face of remorseless time, photography is precious
ITURN the page of the wall calendar to February and whoa, there, in black and white, are maybe twenty youths all frozen on the point of jumping off a wharf in Lyttelton. The date is 1935. The lads are wearing the swimming costume of the time, a onepiece affair with shoulder straps. The wharf is the one from which the ferry leaves for Diamond Harbour.
The lads have climbed over the fence that saves the passengers from falling in, and nothing stands between them and a 10foot plunge but their grip on the top rail and the usual nervousness of anyone about to jump into cold water. Behind them rises eastend Lyttelton, buildings that stand today on Sumner Rd and Reserve Tce, and a huge wallpainted sign for Lane’s Emulsion.
Presumptuous things, calendars. When you buy one in January there’s the whole of a year laid out, 365 blank white boxes for you to fill however you may choose. But I know two people already who, if they’d bought this calendar, would have wasted their money, would never have turned this page and seen the jumping youths.
This calendar’s got extra ironies. It’s put out by the Lyttelton Museum, but the Lyttelton Museum doesn’t exist. Like plenty of buildings here it fell to the quake of 2011 and its exhibits had to be dragged from the rubble and put into storage. But now a committee puts out a calendar of old Lyttelton photos every year as a fundraiser to build a more expansive and expensive museum. So they’re selling bits of the past today to build a future something to house as much of the past as possible. It’s a stew of tenses, a time goulash.
The calendar is popular because the past is popular, and photographs are perhaps the most popular form it comes in. Recently, a fire threatened to engulf the west of Lyttelton. A friend was warned she might have to evacuate her house and she should pack her things. She packed her dog, her father’s ashes and some photographs. The rest she thought she’d leave to fate and insurance.
We are a visual species and it is through the eye that we best take in the world, so photographs gratify us by being vivid and immediate. Furthermore we like them because we know the camera cannot lie, that this was actually how it was. Except, of course, it wasn’t. For two reasons.
The first is simply that the photograph stops time, and in reality nothing stops time.
Time’s as remorseless and persistent as the laws of physics. However the philosophers and scientists may struggle to define just what time is, they all agree on its incessancy.
So had you been there on the Lyttelton wharf that summer’s day in 1935 you wouldn’t have seen quite this scene. The lads would have been laughing and jostling, the gulls screaming, the clouds scudding and the tide going either in or out. You would have seen the one lad jump early — whom I’ve just noticed in the photo as a blur above the water— and then watched as the rest followed and surfaced and struck out for wherever it was they were swimming to. But in the photograph there is none of that. The early jumper is forever just above the water and as for the rest of them, they are always about to jump. They have teetered on the point of jumping for 85 years.
And that’s the other falsifying quality of photographs. They come with time elapsed since they were taken and you as viewer know things that those in the photograph don’t.
Those twenty lads knew all about the First World War. But they knew nothing of the second one. They look to be 15 or 16. Five or six years after this, after they’d swum and dried themselves and finished school and started work, many of them would have marched on to a nearby wharf in uniform and boarded a troop ship that would take them to fight in someone else’s war. And of the twenty it’s probable that some did not come back.
All of which lends this, and every photograph, a poignancy.
Memory’s the surest form of possession, but photography comes in second. Neither is reliable but both defy a little bit the element we live in and against which we are powerless, which is time.