PHOTOGRAPHS STOP TIME and yet they stir memory. Taken at an instant in history, they preserve that moment; viewed years later, an image can unravel our connection to that time and tie us to it all over again. An agent of both capture and release, photographs are one of the great wonders of the visual world.
In my memoir classes, people frequently bring in old photographs, many like those in Roz Leibowitz’s collection, the ones that stirred the Texas twin-sister mystery last week on TSP. Sometimes the photos in my class are offered as “proof” of something—literal illustrations of some aspect of life the writer is trying to wrestle onto the page. “Here you go,” the writers invariably say, “See? I told you.”
The fact is they didn’t tell us, which is why we didn’t get what they were trying to convey the first time, on paper, without the illustration. And then it’s my job to explain how to go home and get that story on the page.
But sometimes photos not only tie us to an event, but tie us up, seeming to trump words. Discovered in a mother’s lingerie drawer after her death, or tucked into a wallet, an unintended inheritance such as these become for the writer something she longs to understand, but never really can. What to do with that, the writer will ask: What am I to make of this development?
The answer is anything you want.
The freedom of not knowing exactly what the photo is, what it meant to the person who had it, who the person is in the photo, or even when in time it was shot releases the writer to think in many directions at once. Do you want to write merely about that discovery of a photo in your sister’s room, or perhaps combine the discovery with the twinned instant of your intuition that your sister had a life outside of your understanding? Not knowing something packs as much a narrative wallop as does knowing something all along.
Don’t believe me?
Ask us.
Margaret and I have a story about a photograph (not the one of us in our annual matching Easter dresses up top), though I don’t know it. Or, to be more specific, while a photograph changed her life forever, I never saw it, and remained blissfully unaware of its existence until old enough to possess the skills to have a very different response than did she.
Maybe she’ll tell you her tale.
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First time here? Here's the idea: 
No surprise, really, that sisterhood, often life’s longest relationship and always one of its most important, has been the Muse for so much creative self-expression by women, and also by men. 
As the suffix of its name suggests, 
{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }
My daughter picked up a picture from a stack I swiped from my mother’s house. They’re all photos of me and my child – sweet little reminders that we’re connected by birth and that I do indeed mother her. I took them from my mother’s well organized collection because I can’t bear to go through mine after a split 10 years ago. The one that most intrigues her shows her arms as skinny little wings and her belly concave. I think it’s the summer I sought out a way to save our lives and she got sick. I think she likes it because we’re laughing.
I love that you still have the same smiles for the camera as you did in that long ago Easter pic–and that your smiles are very different. And Elissa–I think you have more stories to tell. I hope you will.
Welcome back, Elissa: Paige is right (thanks, sister Paige): There are stories here, embedded in your language. But be warned: When we set out to write about our families we step immediately into very rich territory–too rich, sometimes, as your words seem to suggest. Maybe you should give us a little list. http://thesisterproject.com/roach/first-from-marion-25-random-facts-about-our-childhood/ We’d love to see it.
I LOVE your website and thank Ann at MDK for pointing me to it. I started a genealogy project two years ago based on two old photos of my Sicilian grandmothers. I went all the way to a mountaintop village in Sicily to find the house of one grandmother and to Rochester, NY to find the house of another. The hunt has been full of twilight zoney moments that continue to make the journey so much more than a trivial pursuit. Finding the ship manifests (at the Ellis Island website) with their actual names listed, the names of the people with whom they traveled, and information like with whom did they live before leaving their country or origin and to what address are they relocating, make you feel like you are with them on their journey. Things in the photo as simple as looking at the way my grandmother’s hands rest on my grandfather’s head take on new meaning when I imagine what it was like to travel on a ship at age seven with nothing but the clothes on your back and the dreams of your parents, to get to the place where those hands rest comfortably on his head.
Enough. In answer to a question posed earlier, I don’t have any sisters, but I am the second oldest of seven.
Hello, Judy. And welcome. The ability of the facts of the lives of our ancestor to suffuse us, the living, with a heightened sense of living is one of the more remarkable aspects of genealogy. As you said that I was reminded of so many moments when I felt actually joined to something bigger than myself–as I stood in front of graves, or once, on the same harborside from which my red-haired English grandmother left her land behind. Not a bit interested when still a child, I am connected to this story now in ways for which the language of children has no words. Thank you for adding to my understanding with your story and your descriptions. If you want to write about your family, do check in with my memoir prompts. They might help. http://thesisterproject.com/roach/category/by-marion/on-writing-memoir/ Please visit again soon. There’s more to come in the ancestor story.
I wonder if all sisters were put in matching dresses for Easter? We wore them for every occasion. My sister – nearly 7 years older than me – was unenthusiastic about the matching dresses. I thought it was So Cool to match her. (Once, on a vacation in Hawaii, my mother, my sister, and I all had dresses made in the same tropical print but in different styles; that was the ultimate in my book, not my sister’s. I was 5 – she was 12.) Payback came a few years later when I got hand-me-downs that were identical to dresses I’d already worn.
I’m lucky my parents were always camera-crazy — there are so many photos of my friends and family and family friends from my growing-up years. Just every-day moments, eating, digging, watching my parents’ friends deep in conversation at dinner parties. Even crying, sleeping and giving the photographer a full-blown case of teen-age attitude. They do spur memories!
Hi, Elizabeth: Welcome back. Yes! Exactly. My sister hated these; I loved them. That’s absolutely the way it was with us, too. By stepping into those pale-yellow Mary Janes, and pinning on that duck brooch, I got one step closer to her. And she hated it. Oh, yeah. Ah, the said said, she said of it all. Thanks for that. Just wonderful. (And I still have my duck brooch. You?)
Duck brooch. Ladybug stick pin. Norwegian ship brooch. McGovern button. Poodle brooches (many). Brownie pin. Cheetah brooch. Rabbit’s foot key chain. The tackiest worry beads ever sold in Greece but treasured by the 7-year-old who bought them. Got ‘em all!
Oh, Elizabeth: I knew it! I’ve got the “other” one to all the matching pins, including the small cork dancing ladies our father bought back from Thailand went he covered the Tokyo Olympics. And your sister? Did she keep them, do you think? I wonder if Margaret kept any. Margaret? Yoo hoo, Margaret?
Did somebody say “yoohoo”? I was upstairs asleep; try to keep it down, Marion.
Yes, I have some worry beads (malachite-lookalike or maybe malachite) of Mommy’s from an Egypt trip I think, and a lot of odd bits, including some long-ago costume-jewelry pins.
I remember all the pieces you mention, and more, so I will have to go up and take Mommy’s big old wooden jewelry box (purchased when she visited China when it first opened to tourism, I believe), and see what it still holds. Maybe we can have a show-and-tell.
Sorry to have a typing party going on while you’re sleeping.
The malachite was from me (ha!), from my semester abroad in Kenya, during which time our mother did indeed go (unexpectedly) to Egypt, but that’s a whole ‘nuther tale.
Oooh, a show-and-tell. The emphasis here is on the tell since, as I always tell my memoir students, there is no such thing as writer’s block, there is only lack of research.
Research is as easy as opening your jewelry box, your closet http://thesisterproject.com/roach/not-my-sisters-closet/, especially when you have someone to show-and-tell-it with. http://thesisterproject.com/roach/side-dishes-lets-write-it-all-down/
Wonderful. Let’s open the box and see what pops out.
Oh, I only wish my worry beads were malachite. They are clear, full of really shiny gold glitter. Insted of string or leather cord, they are on a gold chain and have gold chains for a tassel. (Note: I use the term “gold” as a color, not a precious metal.) This is what happens when you let a child select her own souvenirs. My guess is my sister doesn’t have her half of the matching sets, of poodle pins, for example. But a few years ago I returned a Beatles button that I’m sure I swiped from her dresser 40 years ago.
Ooooh, Elizabeth: Did you return it face-to-face, or merely slip it into her stuff? And what did she say if you fessed up?
I didn’t mention it, just slipped it into a big bag of family photos and other ephemera.
Cluck. Cluck.
I was sticky fingered when it came to my sister’s possessions, although I always put the purloined objects on the same shelf in my closet. She’d go complaining to my mother about the missing whatever and my mom would say “Just go in her closet and get it.”
Our rooms were connected by a little hallway that went nowhere else. The title of one of your recent posts took me back to the days when I used to sit on the floor in my nightie next to my cracked door, watching the TV she had pulled in to her room — Peyton Place. I don’t know whether it a question of time or appropriate-ness, but I wasn’t allowed to watch Peyton Place.
sister pix: There is a studio, airbrushed photo somewhere of my sister and I at about ages 7 and 4, dressed in matching white and blue dresses. One of us is missing a front tooth. It was taken about the time that family legend has it she had potty trained me when no one else could. Reading TSP over the past few months reminds me of that photo and starts to bring back the pure, sweetest time of our particular sisterhood when everyone had just enough of everything they needed. Soon thereafter my sister was left by the Rocemore School for Girls bus driver outside our home and for some reason no one heard the bell. I maintain it was the beginning of that place inside her that still needs healing. I’m the family historian. I don’t know if she even remembers it. I am probably projecting. But thinking about that photo reminds me of what we had when we were young and what I romanticize regaining as adults. Perhaps I should concentrate on a later photo. I know just the one.
Welcome, Sandi. “I am probably projecting,” as you say, seems to sum up the experience of sisterhood pretty succinctly. Thank you for this story, and for being with us here.
Hi, Sandi. I love that you don’t have the photo in front of you as you write this. How fascinating. What we can’t see but we know exists allows memory to go elsewhere, doesn’t it? I love that, as expressed in the “one of us is missing a front tooth.” It takes the attention away from the literal and moves in onto what we think we know, which is often times even more interesting. Oooooh. That’s what I have to say to that: Ooooh. Nice. Please come back soon. We love your stories.
Marion – Can I just say the 6-year-old Me is very jealous of the Yellow Mary Janes? Yellow Mary Janes – and they matched your sister’s Yellow Mary Janes. I wish the photographer had included your feet. The Yellow Mary Janes are one of the details that makes your story.
Hi, Elizabeth. Isn’t it interesting how much of life can be told through what we wear? I, too, wish the photographer has included a shot of our feet. These days Margaret and I find ourselves laughing when we show up wearing the same kind of shoe. On it goes.
I’m truly enjoying all of the posts of the Sister Project. I really identified with the “Story in a Family Photograph” as photos are for me a catalyst of expression. I have recently started to write a series of posts on memories catapulted by a specific image.
I call it “That Which Runs in Me”
http://a-room-of-one-s-own.blogspot.com/2009/07/that-which-runs-in-me-i.html
The funny things is, I never know where each photo will take me, and to be honest, that is the FUN of it.
Isabel
Hi, Isabel: And welcome to TSP. We are delighted you are here. Photos are a catalyst for expression, aren’t they? They can cure being stuck, or drive you deeper or further into your story. Thanks for sharing yours. We are glad to have it here. Please come back soon.