Photograph of a picnic

I love photographs and this is one of my favourites (it’s a digital scan of an old-fashioned print).

Three people – one adult female, two young boys – enjoying a picnic in an unspecified setting on a bright day. A lawn enclosed by trees. A basket. Rugs on the ground. Sleeveless clothing and shorts, so probably summer. There’s a heat to the scene, but it’s not oppressive. The woman, straight backed, is raising a bottle, one hand on the top, about to open it, and both boys are turning in expectation.  The middle boy, who looks younger, is holding up a cup. Two narrow black lines – one at the centre, one bottom right – look at first also like faults, or cracks, or hairs caught in the lens, but are thin saplings.

The centre of the photograph is blurred and at a certain level of attention is inscrutable: in many ways, it’s a bad photograph, and there is only so much you can tell. If I want to see closer, I can zoom in, but the increased clarity soon breaks out into unclarity – things get clearer, and then suddenly not clear at all, as the faces become grids of blurred squares.

In fact, this is my mum, my brother, and (on the right), me. I don’t know where we are, or exactly when this is, but if I was 6 or 7 and my brother was 4 or 5, this would be 1978 or 1979, when my mum was 36 or 37. The unseen photographer was probably my dad, who would have been 44 or 45. He was good with a camera but this is an asymmetrical composition: the figures are all to the right, which creates a sense that we might have sat down anywhere. Maybe someone else took it.

The photograph has a documentary content – it captures a precise moment that really happened – but it also represents for me much more generally the past: a felt idea of the past, the past as vivid, blurred, receding, forever being itself. That doubleness – here is a punctual moment in time; here is pastness, all of it at once – is why I find this photograph compelling.

The bottom right of the image has some kind of decay: there are blue blotches which, set in contrast to the leaves and grass, have a chemical unnaturalness. The photograph is being eaten away, and the image here is not a reaching back into the past, but is all surface — a document of its own mediation.