Sunday Story #9

Nonno & I: A photo to know if you want to know me

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May was and June will be extremely busy: with the end of the school year, my sister’s upcoming wedding (!!!), and the never-ending job hunt, I have, unfortunately, not had much time to sit and write. The good news is, the ideas are flowing, so there are many drafts in progress, waiting for me to flesh them out. Given that May’s monthly newsletter was impossible to complete, I wanted to share something with you this Sunday. Even if it’s a little shorter than usual.

This is a photo of my Nonno Michele and I during my first trip to Molise. I don’t remember exactly where we were, but I’m sure we were either going up a mountain to attend a village feast or up to Campitello Matese for the day. There’s a lot about this trip I don’t remember, actually. As it continues to fade further into the past, few moments and images remain. I remember crossing the street with him holding a big watermelon, navigating the cars that stopped at the last second. I remember going to the market in Bojano. I remember moments with new friends and meeting his for the first time.

I think a lot about why I do what I do: why do I continue to choose this research, this writing, this work? Working in and with community is not easy and it has brought me to uncontrollable tears multiple times. Fear of disappointment, fear of losing yourself to people pleasing, fear of those who look only for the bad, the negative, in everything you do. These weigh heavily on me and are the reason I ask myself: why?

This photo is part of my why.

Digging Deeper

A while ago (maybe even already a decade? Yikes.), I read a book by Eva Hoffman for class called Lost in Translation. One line has stuck with me since then, from a scene that she describes with her sister:

Sometimes, after the lights are put out, I say to Alinka, “I’m not Eva, I’m Eva’s ghost,” but I scare myself by this almost as much as I scare her; perhaps I am a ghost. Perhaps I’m just imagining that I’m me.

And sometimes, when I remember, this is how I feel.

I’ve always understood remembering to be a bridging of what is real, what is imagined, and what is learned. People’s stories help craft our own narratives; objects and photos serve as concrete artefacts and evidence; and our imaginations help fill in the details lost to time. If we are our experiences, and our experiences lie in our memories, then parts of us, our stories, are also made up of the imaginings and ghosts that have left their traces.

In Oral History and Photography, Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson explore the relationship between these two mediums. They explain: “Both are used as forms of evidence; both require ‘memory work’; and both are forms of storytelling.”¹ They argue that “[if] we want to understand the people we interview – people who grew up in a visual world – we need to know their images, or at least a few of them.”² I consider this photograph extremely important, not just because it’s of my nonno and I, but because it is a part of who I am. This is an image to know if you want to know me.

Much of what is written about photographs discusses their ability to capture ghosts, authenticity, essences, and even aura. I don’t mean this kind of aura photography, I mean what Walter Benjamin referred to as the authenticity and authority of the object, an object that occupies a “unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”³ Long story short, Benjamin argued that even the accuracy of photography can’t capture the specific cultural context of its subject, which is its presence in time and space in any particular moment (aura). So the debate goes: is a photograph meaningful without that context? Can it stand alone in its storytelling? What do we even want photos to do for us?⁴

What, for example, could this picture of my nonno and I tell you without me? Without him? “But it is too simple to equate writing with life, photography with death,” wrote Marianne Hirsch in Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory.⁵

I am scared because I’m falling into that place where you always remember the same things. The stories told over and over again. Is that not also a kind of death? What I want to remember is what it felt like to hug my nonno. The Cassandra who got to hug him is as much a ghost to me as he is. What did his laugh sound like again? How could I forget that? Was his cologne sandalwood?

Though this photo can never answer those questions, it captures a time and space when we were side by side. And even if the details are blurred, I can still conjure what it felt like to be his granddaughter.

For this week’s questions, I would love to hear your thoughts on the debates around storytelling and photography (questions in the text above).

Cass

1. Oral History and Photography, Freund and Alistair Thomson, editors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2.

2. Ibid., 5.

3. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 3-4.

4. Particularly now that many of us regularly carry thousands, if not tens of thousands, of photos in our pockets on a daily basis.

5. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).