: s o t o h P y l i Fam d e k r o w re Exhibition catalogue includes an interview with the photographers, images from the exhibition and poems
John Levett Anne-Marie Glasheen
Photographs by:
Supported by:
John Levett john.levett1@googlemail.com
Alec & Kaye Pettifer, Anonymous (x2), Susan & Silvino Ferreirada Silva (www.canallondres.tv), Suzanne Reed, Joyce Pettifer, Kate Glasheen, Gladys Poncelet (www.poncelet.me.uk), Helen Goulding, Jacqui Poncelet, Daniel Glasheen (www. amberbow.com), Lucy Williams (www.fitzrovianoir.wordpress. com), James & Hanna Glasheen, Annabel McLaren and Barry Milton (www.myriadbooks.com), H. Glasheen, Dita Iserles.
Anne-Marie Glasheen mimi.glasheen@gmail.com Interview by: Eloise Donnelly eloisedonnelly@gmail.com Curated by: Louise Forrester louise@viewfinder.org.uk
Published by: Edited by: Lisa Robertson editor@viewfinder.org.uk
Viewfinder Photography Gallery Linear House, Peyton Place, off Royal Hill, Greenwich, London SE10 8RS
Design by: www.viewfinder.org.uk Mandana Ahmadvazir designer@viewfinder.org.uk Also available as a colour, e-publication: www.viewfinder.org.uk/shop
First published April 2010 Š The artists and authors. The views expressed in this publication are not necessarily the views of the publisher or the editors.
down in the nether regions day and night alert however tired for who knows who will call and when W. will wish to speak to F. or the other way round break due soon so weary… I could sleep and let time tick by bombs fall by day and bombs fall by night so loud the bangs in my ears so bad the devastation in my eyes so acrid the smoke in my lungs so choking the dust in my mouth so filthy the grime on my skin London’s burning so weary… I could sleep and let time tick by Joyce had to leave school, and Joan, Edna and Norma were evacuated to Cornwall. Joyce describes going to the end of Southend Lane with Alec to get the tram to work. As they neared the Tiger’s Head they saw a plane drop its bomb – the black cross and swastika clearly visible. They ran back down the road, a woman took them in as the plane opened fire. Not long after, viewing a huge crater left by a bomb dropped near their house which killed several people, Norman decided to get the girls back from Cornwall and move the family to Aunt Kit’s in Wealdstone. ‘At least we’ll all die together if a bomb drops.’ Gladys, Bob and Alec stayed on with their father for a while. One day, they learned that 6 teachers and 38 children had been killed when Gladys’s old school – Catford Central – was bombed in broad daylight, and that children were fired on as they ran for shelter. Some of those teachers had taught her. In April 1944 Win caught measles. Gladys’s best friend suggested they go to a dance at a club they belonged to. Because her mother was ill she refused, but Win insisted she go. That night Gladys met her future husband. But that’s another story.
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The other tells of a tree laden with peaches that grew from a neighbour’s garden. Her mother would gather from ground and branches an annual crop. With an air of anticipation she evokes the fragranced house. Sees once more the jars fill with steaming jam tastes toast spread with this treat savours each chunk of the cherished fruit. The one harks back to the fireworks displays at Crystal Palace viewed free from home The other to Crystal Palace burning watched from the corner with the neighbours Both remember the roaming roving rambling freedom days Days in and days out Their playground encompassing the Horniman-Forsters ParkBeckenham Place Park And both recollect the end of childhood Beckenham Days were Beautiful Days In Spring as we strolled in the woods And listened to birds sing in the trees As we watched the young men Tie bundles of bluebells To bicycle saddles To offer to sweethearts Beckenham Days were Beautiful Days We Gladyses-five dressed to the nines in gowns and glitz Danced to Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones at the Regal That last time I wore an embroidered blue dress Gold shoes and a burgundy ribbon around my neck The atmosphere was electric That last dance When the boys Went away When war broke out, Gladys transferred from Beckenham Exchange back to London, spending some time at Scotland Yard. She moved on to the Home Office, Home Security and eventually the Inner War Cabinet. Marines guarded these underground offices. Mrs. Churchill would visit, worried her husband would be injured when he was up on the roof, checking St. Paul’s had not been struck.
John Levett john.levett1@googlemail.com
Never read more into an image than is there. Try not to and fail. The truly interesting feature of the family album is what the family hides—the abuse, the ignoring, the lies, the violence, the gathering disappointments, the slow death of ambition. In 1987 I moved out of the house in which my mother had died eight years before. Amongst the clutter that went to the tip was (most of) the family photo collection—the repository of all the myths, assumptions, creations, deceits, omissions, avoidances and elephants in the room. I retained a handful of snaps; why these and not others I can’t recall. Some were taken by my father, some by me, some by ‘an other’. All are certainly mirrored in the conventions of the family album. None carry the weight of significance. My mother and I never talked of the ‘significant’—who my father was, her life before they met, what jobs she had done, what larks she’d been up to. She handed down a love of Bach and the singing of Kathleen Ferrier; film noir and John Ford; history and politics; gardening and Germany—without ever confiding how they all came comfortably together in her own life. She would occasionally gather up remembrances and ask if we could have a day out at some spot but never uncover why; I drove and colluded in the privacy of her own moments. Reworking the images complemented my revaluation of my life with my mother—giving certain moments a fresh immediacy; asking who was behind the camera; who was absent; what events were never recorded; what was the photograph never taken— recreating the narrative, rewriting the memory. Failing again. Failing better.
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HOLD THE LINE PLEASE
Eli was a tall man with beard of snowy white he’d scan a dim horizon with unseeing eyes of blue while fingers that once worked dough searched wearily for answers from the pages of his favourite book in a poky cramped room crammed with pictures galore memorial cards poked in frames 80 ‘they’ counted in all each girl to attention recites in the gloom verses from the Bible for chocolate-button rewards and later fruit and wine gums to take home to the others Frederick’s son (they called him Uncle Fred) was a cabbie. He’d take Norman and Gladys (when Norman and Joyce went, they went by tram) to visit Eli in the Almshouses. He’d turn up on Boxing Day and take the ‘Uncles’ to the pub and then return them, usually the worse for wear. He also drove them to and from funerals when the need arose. Gladys recalls Fred driving them to Greenwich to get the paddle steamer to visit her Aunt Ag in Southend. The one tells of a tree laden with peaches that grew in their Bellingham garden. Plucking one she’d sink her teeth into the tender flesh. Eyes sparkling she brings her cupped hands up under her chin. Nearly eighty years on she feels the juice burst from her mouth and drip down her young face.
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ducked shells and hollered to the others. The house where you were born lies under the Lewisham shopping centre and multi-storey car park. Were I parked there, and the ghost of the house to materialize, would my car appear, perched on the chimney stack? 22
The baker’s window advertises sexy club wear; washing hangs in a filthy upstairs window; what lies beyond is concealed by a tattered curtain. What would Eli and Ann say to see it? At the butcher’s where you prepared meat, Chinese meals are cooked and packaged, ready for collection. Buddleia sprouts from the windowsill on the second floor, and where you once proudly stood for the camera, traffic cones pose. The rented rooms where your brother was shot are buried along with their ghosts under Peckham’s multi-storey car park and multiscreen cinema. When will multi-murders end? In place of the church where you and Win were married – the fingers of a modern edifice entreat the heavens.
SOLDIER SOLDIER WILL YOU MARRY ME
Norman was the only one never to work in Eli’s bakery. He got a job at the butcher’s up the road instead. Then he lied about his age and joined the militia; his father bought him out – several times. In the end he enlisted and in 1909, aged 19, he went off to India. He was there for the Delhi Durbar and was on horseback for hours in the hot sun. He told my mother that when they needed a pee, they just peed in their riding boots! At the outbreak of war, his regiment was ordered to France. From Marseilles, they went straight to the Front. He was there throughout the war until he was badly wounded in October 1918. butcher butcher cut me a nice steak to eat with the bread your brothers bake cut, crush, chop, grind, bone and trim boil blood for puddings save offal for faggots see the saw and smell the raw flesh
That stench of raw flesh It didn’t prepare you Make the trenches more sufferable Death easier to handle From no-man’s-land did you carry your C.O. like a side of beef to the field dressing station Did you hear the next shell burst Feel life drain from the body slumped over your shoulder Did the event unfold slowly As slowly you put one foot down in front of the other Or did it occur in a split second Before your foot reconnected with earth Did you see the flash Feel the fragment strike your head Pierce your eye Punch your stomach Did you lie there Under the corpse Did you think I am dead Norman survived and in 1919 he married his first cousin Winifred. In 1920 my mother Gladys, the first of seven children, was born. In 1923 they moved to one of Bellingham’s ‘Homes for Heroes’ built for regular soldiers who returned from the Great War. As the family grew, they moved to a bigger then a still bigger house on the estate. His war pension paid the £1 rent, his wages as a postman fed the family. If he made the mistake of drinking spirits, he’d end up behind the sofa with young Gladys. Back in the trenches, he
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A lot of good a strict upbringing did them… all save Stan liked their tipple too much. Oliver moved out of London and settled in Bournemouth; his wife apparently a dreadful cook. Bus driver Frederick was not a nice man; he beat his wife Elizabeth and made her go on the street to keep him. Between times, he lived with an ‘other’ family in Deptford. One day, fearing for her life, Elizabeth bought a revolver. Then came poor Walter – did he drown in the Nile or was he eaten by a crocodile? Whatever his fate, he never returned and as his alcoholic wife couldn’t cope with their children, they were taken into care. Creepy Ralph, as your nieces call you, was it you who threatened Fred’s wife and son? Was it you stealing from the till? Your mother dead, your father blind and bankrupt, was it guilt that drove you and Mary to care for Eli; Mary, a worse cook even than Oliver’s wife? A ‘sly sod’ was Stanley whose wife, I’m told, made up for his sobriety. Albert had a nice wife, that’s all I know, though I met both his children. Norman, the seventh son, was my grandfather. Having partially regained his sight, Eli Henry died at the Bakers Almshouses in Leyton just short of his 90th birthday.
Anne-Marie Glasheen www.glasheen.co.uk mimi.glasheen@gmail.com
How much do we know about the histories of the families we are born into? With each death, so much is lost. Family photos provide answers, but raise questions. They hold keys, and they hide secrets. What is reality and what is myth in the various tales that circulate, occasionally modified to suit the teller’s viewpoint? Using old and new techniques, ‘Family Photos: Reworked’ is a series of images that combine original family prints with modern ones, reworked pinhole shots of ‘Pettifer’ addresses, and poems and texts inspired by stories told and information gleaned about three generations of my mother’s family. Her grandfather was a master baker in Lee High Road eventually bankrupted by the sons who worked with him. Her father was a butcher, also in Lee High Road, before he enlisted. After four years in India, he was sent to France in 1914 and badly wounded a month before the end of the Great War. She was born in Catford and grew up in one of Bellingham’s ‘Homes for Heroes’. She remembers the bombing of London in the last war when she worked as a telephonist for the inner cabinet. This project is as much about what is forgotten as it is about what is remembered. I should like to thank the following for their kind contributions: Alec & Kaye Pettifer Annabel Mclaren & Barry Milton www.myriadbooks. com, Daniel Glasheen www.amberbow.com, Gladys Poncelet, Helen Goulding, Jacqui Poncelet www.poncelet.me.uk, James & Hannah Glasheen, Joyce Pettifer, Kate Glasheen, Lucy Williams http://fitzrovianoir.wordpress.com, Susan & Silvino Ferreira da Silva www.canallondres.tv, Suzanne Reed, Reed & Co, and Colin and Sheila Martin of the Bakers Almshouses in Leyton for their help ‘in kind’. Many thanks also to Gladys Poncelet and Joyce Pettifer for the loan of photographs and for sharing their invaluable memories.
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Poem TALL TALES, TRUTHS & ALL
In 1892 at the age of 46, Eli Henry Pettifer, previously a Miller’s traveller, moved into 83 High Road, Lee with his wife and sons and set himself up as a Master Baker. On the Lord’s Day, Ann would carefully lay out the boys’ clothes for the weekly outing to the Baptist Chapel, and the only words to be read on this day were those from the Holy Book. 1900 baker baker bake some bread – while your seven sons are sleeping watch it rise and send its scent ascending through the ceiling 1910 Eli Henry going blind is it ‘something in the flour’? with your wife confined to bed wake your boys and bring them down show them how to mix good bread 1913 not a good year for this baker Ann’s in the next world Norman in India Fred’s shot dead by his spouse found ‘not guilty’ though confessing to his murder Eli – ruined – moves to an almshouse 1914 some sons go to war Albert a prisoner Norman wounded Walter’s ship sunk sailing the Med he survives and perishes later no one knows how or where or when
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• How has this project affected your own approach to documenting family life and the creation of your own family albums? AMG: Although I love the mystery of old photographs and ‘imagining’ the stories behind them, I feel I should go through my bulging envelopes of photos, bin a whole lot, and catalogue and label the rest before I forget ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘when’, and so that my children and grandchildren will know who’s who. I have however created a few ‘print-on-demand’ books that use photographs to narrate other family stories. JL: No family. No album. Speaks volumes. • Do you think the advent of digital photography and web-based photo albums has fundamentally altered the tradition of the family album? AMG: Inevitably, but there is still nothing that beats physically opening an album; the feel and sometimes creak and even smell of the heavy pages. It’s like opening Pandora’s Box but releasing ghosts rather than ills. JL: Yes. The album reflected photography—it was an occasional affair. Taking out the album, reflecting upon it, recalling events, fixing the position of family members, confirming status, constructing stories, creating reference points, establishing hierarchies and lineage—all these were rituals, supporting myths, embellishing stories, promoting unity, writing fiction. All tribes do it. Digital photography is no longer occasional, no longer needs the buying of the film, the taking of the camera, the remembering to rewind, the winding off, the taking to the chemist and all the paraphernalia that used to be. Any child born today will need a parallel life devoted to the archive once maturity arrives. However, the ‘looking behind the veil’ (to paraphrase Victor Burgin) won’t change. Annette Kuhn: “Family photographs may affect to show us our past, but what we do with them—how we use them—is really about today, not yesterday.” • What are your plans for future projects? AMG: I’d like to see if I can track down and find out the truth about the ‘other family’ of my grandfather’s murdered brother. I have family photographs taken in Europe and beyond, and ancestral roots that stretch across this continent as far back as 1472. There are plenty more tales to tell in words and images… JL: Nearly all my stuff is about memory and I want to change that. Possibly sometime.
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What doing it has achieved is acceptance that some questions will never be answered; that speculation is an ultimately futile practice and I might as easily invent another life story for all the suspects; that I have no more questions to ask; that living with uncertainty and ragged ends is no longer the issue that it used to be. I’ve achieved resolution by boredom. 16
Second, I appreciate my mother’s humanity. She made some serious mistakes in her life and created a labyrinth of false trails that had more than one person guessing at what happened but I now appreciate that we all do that. I doubt that she finished up with what she wanted and I think she lived her life with a dull regret that sometimes surfaced; that’s not uncommon. From what I pieced together I think that she grew up having a lark with life and then wanted normality which she got more of as she aged. The circumstances of life, however, stayed. When she was dying she said: ‘I’m being punished’. Third, she made a decent fist at bringing up her child to whom she handed down music, theatre, opera, film, seasides, moors, downs, marshes, trains, gardens, walking, motorbikes, poetry, novels, politics, history, painting, sculpture, cats, education as liberation, serious talk, love of complexity, tolerance, inclusiveness. I have left the project with avoidance, ambiguity, equivocation; left with the same nouns, different chapter. • Both of you have pursued particularly personal projects; did you have any reservations about bringing these to a public forum? AMG: Not really, since so many of the players are no longer alive and the stories are, I hope, of interest to the living. There are things to be proud of and not so proud of, but a family’s history is its heritage and contributes directly or otherwise to its individual members’ sense of identity. JL: No. My mother fudged the truth. So do I. So do you. • Did you have any input from other family members or relatives? AMG: My aunt lent me the family album so that I could scan in the images I needed. I also ‘interviewed’ her and my mother about their memories. This project is as much about what is forgotten as it is about what is remembered, and much has been forgotten. JL: No. I had an input from Jo Spence who wrote: “We believe that we all have sets of personalized archetypal images in memory, images which are surrounded by vast chains of connotations and buried memories. In photo therapy we can dredge them up, reconstruct them, even reinvent them, so that they can work in our interests, rather than remainining the mythologies of others who have told us about that ‘self’ which appears to be visible in various photographs.” Family members and relatives are members of those ‘others’.
Interview with John Levett(JL) Anne-Marie Glasheen(AMG) by Eloise Donnelly
• What inspired the project? 13
AMG: Moving house! I discovered I was a stone’s throw from where my mother was born and grew up and that her father’s roots were strong in the area. Having come to England when I was six, I’d always been fascinated by where I’d been uprooted from, taking for granted my English ancestry. The more I delved the more intrigued I became. JL: Birth. Nothing made sense after that. I grew up in a family of me, mum and gran. Aunts, uncles and cousins popped in, fulfilled obligations and popped out again. Sometimes they talked loudly and sometimes in whispers. I asked questions, got answers on the easy ones and ‘We don’t talk about that’ or ‘You’ll have to ask your mother’ or ‘I’ll tell you when you’re older’ or ‘Let’s go and play in the garden’. I got various instructions about what to say if anyone asked about the family. We moved house a lot. Sometimes with gran, sometimes solo; sometimes into the attics of grand houses, sometimes one room; once by the seaside, once beside a park. I had no reason to suppose that this wasn’t life. Life settled in Luton sometime around 1948 or 49 (dates became important in fixing the transit of people and events). Enter Uncle John. I wasn’t keen on Uncle John (the moustache) and nor was gran who always went up to her bedroom when he turned up. That’s when the project began in earnest—who is he, why does gran go upstairs when he comes, why does he want to take me to the pictures, why do we have to talk quietly when he’s around, why is he building a chicken run in the garden, why is he building a bathroom, why does he tell me I’m going to be an engineer when I grow up? Second birth: life as avoidance. As questions mounted so did avoidances. On everybody’s part. I can’t remember when it was I first asked ‘Who is my father?’ but it must have been early on when I discovered that most people around had one. ‘He died in the war’ was a catch-all that must have had a lot of currency in those years. By early teens (not that teens had yet been invented) I had decided that the weight of probability was on ‘Uncle John’. I asked mum. Mum said she’d tell me on my sixteenth birthday. She did. He died in the war. I got more details about the emergence of ‘Uncle John’ who was, allegedly, my father’s brother whom my mother had met while searching for my father after an air raid. I should have stopped her in full flight to save her the pain of invention. I did the next best thing and never asked again.
What had evolved and what continued was an hermetic relationship in which two people lived with each other without communicating about the one thing that that had brought them to together. The question never went away. My mother’s history never surfaced completely. 14
• In what ways did the project evolve? JL: Both my mother and father died on the edge of the 1980s. Both took their connivances with them. It took more than another decade to return to the scene. I began writing a memoir for myself to try and piece together every memory I could gather, every conversation we had on family, every snatched aside, every coincidence of people and places. I recalled people who’d featured in my infant years and then left the scene; people who’d been frequent visitors to the cornershop my mother ran, who’d stayed, talked, left without buying; friends who’d come and gone; friends I’d lost for reasons beyond recall. A large part of a life with gaps had passed and dredging up the sunken bits might fill spare time in the remainder. Over the decades, accompanying various programmes of selfdestruction, I had destroyed much of the accumulated archive of my life including letters, photographs, memorabilia. Little remained to make much of. I began with a portrait of my mother; formal, posed, either intended for someone or out of the social practice of periodic sitting for a studio portrait. I manipulated the portrait by copying, photo-copying, sketching, overlaying, scanning, scratching, erasing and finally rephotographing. In the first instance I was expecting insights to emerge from simply immersing myself in variations of the same image but when I extended the exercise to other images what emerged were more questions and created narratives. Who took the photograph? Who was never photographed? What events were never recorded? Where was family? Where were the holidays, the birthdays? What about Coronation Day, the street parties, any parties? Where were friends, did I have any? Where was the progress of a life? There’s a photograph of me and a dog. Mine? Ours? Another dog, another question. There were photographs of my mother with cars, by a roadside, near a common, in a garden. I traced the car, the road, the common, the garden to the usual suspect. What turned up was a life that she never revealed, never shared part of, had no memorabilia that I could recall, once knew people that had become forever excluded. It was as if a life had stopped one day in August 1944 and a new one fashioned along with a fresh history. I came across Marianne Hirsch’s book ‘Family Frames: photography, narrative and post-memory’ and discovered that others had done this thing before. Through ‘Family Frames’ I discovered the writing of Jo Spence and Valerie Walkerdine and
began writing again. The image and the text became inseparable; neither would suffice alone. AMG: Initially it was going to be montaged images only and reproductions of originals. But after attending a London Independent Photography meeting at the Viewfinder, I felt inspired by members’ pinhole pictures. So I shot particular buildings using a pinhole camera, as I wanted to apply old techniques to contemporary views. The results weren’t great though, and some have had a dose of ‘reworking’! • What factors guided your selection of images to be reworked and displayed? JL: There was hardly any selection process. I had a limited of number of images left after various episodes of destruction over the years and those that I had retained were the only ones to work with. Why those survived is worth considering. There are few that contain me and few that were taken by me; few that appear to express joy, love, tenderness towards the other. Mostly the gaze is uncertain, insecure, cautious; appearing to be (another) obligatory portrait for another. My memories of my mother are of someone who struggled against uncertainty, unfulfilment, loss of something that almost was. I recognised that in the gaze. Or I read it into it. I never asked, she never told. AMG: I wanted to use significant documents, old family photos of buildings and addresses that still exist (unfortunately two now sit under car parks) and photos of family members as they were. Having scanned them into the computer, I combined them with more recent digital shots. • What influenced the ways in which you manipulated the images? AMG: I put people ‘then’ together with other ‘thens’ and with places ‘now’ and with older ‘selves’. I wanted each image to tell a story. JL: Chance, serendipity, mood, randomness, boredom, time of day, time of year, anger, the catch of light. I tried anything that might suggest an insight, a recognition of memories that meet, a coincidence. I was more interested in what my feelings were while working with them and what the outcome of the project would be on a personal level.
• Did you have any unexpected reactions to your re-working of the photographs? AMG: No; the ideas behind the project have generated interest but the reworked images haven’t been seen by anyone. JL: First, ‘I’ve had enough of this’. I’ve been reworking these images one way and another since about 1995 and that’s quite enough.
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