Looking at us from the past

5 November 2020

I attended a creative writing course a long time ago and one of the exercises we were set was to look at a photograph or magazine-clipping of someone unknown to us and base a story around that person.  I found this very productive.  Just staring at the face and perhaps the clothes would begin to suggest personality traits, a social background and a life history. I’ve been writing a piece of fiction (I won’t dignify it with the word ‘novel’ yet…) about a British couple who go to live in Russia, around 1904, when he is appointed as manager in a textile mill near Moscow. (There were many British managers and engineers there before the Revolution…).  As I write, I have in mind this couple, and my story starts with their photograph –

These two look more sophisticated than my characters, Archie and Edith.  I think of Edith as being blond. Archie would not have had such fine clothes and wouldn’t have looked so relaxed in such a situation, having a formal photograph taken. I imagine them in a studio in Moscow. You can see from the mount that this picture was actually taken in Alexandria. I should love to know who these two really were, and what led them to such an exotic location, where they still manage to look as though they are relaxing on the terrace in a Surrey garden. Surely they must be British ex-pats, like my characters. Apart from that, they are not very like Archie and Edith from Rochdale in Lancashire, but somehow their faces fit my vision.

I haven’t yet found a photograph of my other main protagonist – Nadezhda. I shall know her when I see her…

I have quite a collection of photographs now. This one from Alexandria is an anomaly as most of them are of people from east and central Europe, many wearing some version of national or regional dress. I included some in a previous post, and here are more that I’ve acquired since then. These are all from the Czech Republic – found in an antiquarian bookshop in Brno.

The backs of the photographs are interesting too and help to date the images, considering the design and the name of the locations, some in their German as well as Czech forms.

It seems sad that such personal things have lost the connection with their homes and families of origin, not helped by me displacing them even further away from their roots. But at least they survive and continue to have a purpose, just speaking selfishly. They are incredibly evocative of a time and place which fascinates me – and full of information, especially in terms of dress history. But I do try sometimes to look beyond the clothes and all the other cultural signifiers to catch a glimpse of that real person looking back at me.