Sharing Images

http://www.flickr.com/photos/glennaa/2619180756/

This image moves me to tears.  The names on the suitcases are like names on gravestones.  What did these people pack inside?  Personal items such hairbrushes, favourite items of clothes, tidbits of food, photos of loved ones?  How could they know that their heads would be shaved, that they would all wear the same uniform, that maggots would be swimming in their watery soup and the photos would be all that remained of their relatives.

This is a photo of my mother and a towel that my mother embroidered in her teens in the 1930’s.  My grandmother made the linen in the village of Bolshoi Osnyaki (now called Velike Osnyaki in the Ukraine).  The women and girls would sit next to each other at night and copy the traditional motifs from one another.  It is one of the few things that survived my mother’s evacuation from USSR to a forced labour camp in Germany in 1941.   When I was little I also remember that she had a small yellow purse with a delicate silver chain handle and a light brown silk lining.  It was made of a celluloid material and one corner was burnt red.   She kept her photos in that purse.  Later she threw it away together with many of the photos.

Flickr is a valuable resource where we can all share images.  However, every picture has a story, a provenance.  Often the stories aren’t told and this is the shame about Flickr.  It reminds me of my mother’s purse crammed with photos.  There were some taken in Germany after the war. Women dressed in trousers and my mother holding a bike.   There was a man behind them holding his hat above one of their heads.  Another was of women lying on a rug with huge bunches of flowers.  Apart from my mother in the photos who were these people?  What were their names and their stories?

There needs to be more to document photos rather than just a title or tag.  Cockburn Libraries often shares images in Flickr.  These are photos of people who have attended events or workshops.  Sometimes there are close up photos of a few people.  Maybe we have to be more selective of the photos we choose – not put so many, and add the story of the event.  It would be good to put names to the faces and to tell the story, no matter how insignificant it seems to us at the time.  Sometimes the photo might be all that remains.