Old Photographs

Progression 3

The Big Ship

The following is an image taken from a book, the title of which, for the moment at least, I will not divulge. What I will say, is that the image below was taken in Poland in the 1930s.

What can we deduce from the photograph?

We see a young man posing awkwardly before a large ship. Is he a prospective passenger? He has no luggage, but maybe that is out of shot of the camera. He seems a little nervous and is looking not at the camera but away to his left. In truth, he appears not to be looking anywhere at all, but in on himself. A young girl stands to his right.

Is she crying? She's holding something to her face. Perhaps she is about to sneeze? Or is she just smelling something as if to remember?

Behind the young girl is a man with a bicycle, come to look at the ship. Having talked about bicycles on the previous page, I find him particularly interesting. The bicycle somehow lends him movement, whereas the two other people (standing on the right of the detail below) appear frozen - even though they have been caught whilst walking. One can imagine the man having just walked his bicycle to the front of the dock, ready to walk away again. The bicycle gives him a sense of purpose, perhaps even urgency - the ship is a distraction from the business of the day.

Over the left hand shoulder of our 'main proagonist' we see a couple, who appear to be kissing. Perhaps one of them - the woman - is about to board the ship, bound for some foreign destination? She has a large bag in her hand. The man she is kissing will be left behind, with just this moment for company - at least until they see each other again. Will they see each other again? Or could we be witnessing their last moment together, seeing the kiss the man carried with him to the grave?

As I wrote on the previous page, Roland Barthes describes how, "in the photograph, Time's immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged..."

One can imagine, if this was the last kiss, that just as the moment is immobilsed before us, swelling as Time's rules dictate it must move forward, so the mind of the lovestruck man would swell, with the excessive replaying of the moment. Time would, in Barthes' words, become engorged within him. But he is unable to move on. Time assumes a monstrous mode.

Of course, all this is conjecture. As Barthes puts it: 'The photograph is without future'; the only future we can give the photograph is that which we create for it. However, all those in the photograph did of course live beyond the moment, and in the case of this image, for our awkward and unassuming subject, this 'beyond', this future, was a tragic one.

This man was Abram Roze, brother of Fela Roze. He died in the Holocaust, and this image, was one of a collection discovered in Auschwitz after liberation. (Click here read a short text on Fela Roze).

Although this section of my website is not directly concerned with the Holocaust (click here for work on the Victims of the Holocaust), there are aspects of this photograph's image, it's provenance, and my writing about my own family photographs which I find interesting, and will look at in a little more detail.

The Distant Ship

Having looked at my own family photographs, I wrote the following on my Blog:

"...I've become very interested in the peripheral parts of photographs, particularly in relation to images taken near the sea (distant swimmers, ships and so on). I have already written about windows in relation to other photographs, but having recently scanned and observed so many images, I've come to realise that it's these areas which are the most 'genuine', perhaps because those inhabiting the distance are freed from the artifice of a pose, or because at the moment the picture was taken (just as they were for the rest of their lives) they were oblivious to the photograph's principal subject and the one taking the picture.

This obliviousness is something I find quite compelling, particularly in relation to my work on the Holocaust, whose victims were by and large anonymous, both in life and now in death. Although I wasn't living at the time, many members of my family were; they were the ones on the periphery, the specks in the distance, oblivious to what was going on behind them."

One image from the family collection particularly interested me. It was taken in c.1976 and shows my brother in the foreground playing tennis, a lovely image of a fondly remembered family holiday.

Below is a detail of the same image showing a ship sailing across the horizon.

Regarding this image, I wrote the following:

"Looking out to sea we can see a ship, a tanker, sailing under the direction of more (and no doubt large numbers of) human beings, hidden away and quite unknowable. Yet for a time we shared the same stretch of the planet. Those onboard would have had no idea as to our existence, they would have seen at best a mass of coloured dots on the horizon. Yet this degree of separation does not make us any less human, any less feeling. Distance does not negate our hopes and our ambitions. Those few unknowable dots, in the eyes of the ship's crew, were my family, and have in the years that followed, seen more members come and go. And whether the distance between us is measured in years or miles, we must never forget, that what we see as specs on the horizon, or dots that make the picture on the TV screen, are, in the end, the same people as us."

Having discovered this image of Abram Roze and returned again to my own photographs, I couldn't help but entertain the idea, that the ship sailing oblivious in the distance in c.1976, was the same as that next to which Abram Roze was standing somewhere in Poland in the 1930s. The idea that the ship which had shared with my family the same stretch of the planet, had once shared a space with him, seemed to echo what I'd already written; that people, shrunk by distance, whether through miles or time, are still people - there is a connection between us.

There is also something about the ship as a tragic metaphor for escape. Abram Roze perished in the Holocaust, perhaps in Auschwitz, and with this knowledge, one can't help wish his escape on the ship next to which he is standing. Again we hear the words of Roland Barthes; his horror of an 'anterior future of which death is the stake.'

As I look at the photograph, I recall his words on time, engorged within the frame of the photograph. As I wrote on the previous page, 'the idea of time engorged conjures up apocalyptic images of disaster; time not able to proceed but growing nonetheless, swelling within the frame of the picture, the world shaking as it struggles to chew and to swallow. The man in the picture above is sure to fall victim to this catastrophe ("he is dead and he's going to die"), but the man who's left his bicycle (and as such the photograph) will instead be sure to survive.'

Reading back these words, I realise how tragically appropriate they are to this photograph of Abram Roze, how they describe so accurately the scene of which he is a part. A catastrophe is approaching, one which will have unimaginably tragic consequences for him, his family, for Poland and the world. He is dead and he's going to die.

The one difference is, the cyclist has not left his bike behind. I wonder what became of him? And of the lovers in the distance.