Kitchen 1991 – A One Shot Story by David Hume

Our daughter was visiting recently and started rummaging through one of the boxes of prints she found in a cupboard, looking for baby photos. “You really should scan these,” she observed, which of course is true, but not something I had much intention of doing. But then I recalled a recent video I’d seen of an Epson FF 680W scanner munching through seemingly endless piles of prints at a great rate, so I bought one, thinking that when I’d done our prints I could lend it out to any number of friends who could then scan their own prints. The scanner, by the way, is very good, and enhances faded prints very nicely and has pretty good software.

Anyway – the only point of this is that I scanned one packet of prints of which I had absolutely no memory. I still have no memory of taking this shot, but in that odd way that photos have, looking at the series I could place the occasion, and a fragmentary, ghost-like memory of the day formed. I am not sure how much I really remember and how much has been created in my imagination from these photos that I felt I was seeing for the first time.

My father and some of my sisters and cousins were at my grandmother’s house. My grandfather had died a couple of years before that, and it was now time for the family to sell the house and find assisted living for my grandmother. So it was a sombre, somewhat melancholy day that yet had an air of inevitability and purpose to it.

This roll contains a series of photos showing members of my family moving around the house; the younger ones running and playing, the older ones moving slowly between rooms, my grandmother in her armchair smoking; resigned and sad. I don’t feel I could share those, but this one photo seemed to sum up the day in a way that feels personal but does not intrude on the memories of the others who were there.

In this shot my cousin looks out of the kitchen window. The kitchen was the hub of that house, where at any time my grandfather could be found sitting at the table reading the paper and smoking; tapping his ash directly on to the floor, likely with a glass of muscat at hand. I was twenty nine at the time the photo was made, and a lot of my life had evolved and still revolved around that kitchen.

I rescanned this image from the negative in the packet. It was shot on Ilford FP4. The camera is a Minox 35GT that I bought a few years before as my travel camera and which I had taken to loading with black and white film and carrying with me in some sort of self-conscious pose that I hope I grew out of before too long.

The Minox was great – tiny, and I really liked its aperture-priority zone-focus operation with an electronic shutter that would stay open for up to 30 seconds depending on the film speed. In dim places and at night I would simply rest it on a solid surface and hope for the best. That’s what I must have done here, and I think it also accounts for the frame being squarer than 24x36mm. I surmise I rested it on the stairs that led to the motion picture editing suite my grandfather had constructed in the roof space of the house. One of the steel rods that supported the stairs would have cropped off the side of the frame as there was no way I could have been looking through the viewfinder when I made the shot.

So there you have it. I found this photo quite moving and yet felt it might also have a broader appeal, so I thought I’d share it with the good folk of 35mmc. Thanks for reading!

Prologue: 1966

I was just sending some family photos off to a relative and I noticed this one… same kitchen. Twenty five years earlier I am four years old here and my mum is fitting a new jumper to me that she had just finished knitting. Same kitchen, same table.  It was taken by my grandfather on a Minolta Autocord. Normally we posed for photos. He used to set up hot lights indoors and shoot us on sheet film for practice.  But I think this evening he was just testing out his potato-masher flash. It was white I think, but I’m not sure of the brand. I remember it from later years when it had been fixed many times with epoxy glue and tape. He shot a whole roll in a few minutes and they are very casual. I’m guessing he just wanted to develop the roll and see how the flash was exposing. Or maybe he had already been fixing it and wanted to test that it still worked. Anyway, it’s one of my favourite rolls.

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