11. Past images, future sounds

Photography inbetween chapters in the lives of old houses

Nov 22, 2022

When everything goes well, it seems enough for me to simply sit and let a post be what it wants. There’s always at least one thing on my mind, more or less deeply related to the set of photos of the week, that seems to be wanting to be put on the page. It’s always either related to something I’ve already talked about, or to something I want to talk about and will, when the right opportunity to do so presents itself.

This week’s photos were taken in the old house in the country that C.L. and A.S. are going to renovate. It was quite intriguing for me to visit this house, that looked a bit like my old house before it was emptied, trying to decipher what kind of life the people who used to own it lived in this old building.

It is someone else’s old house. Mine is so full of memories that visiting it means revisiting my life and the life of members of my family, thinking about the ones that aren’t there anymore, and visiting it once again in the ensuing dreams. Not in this one, still and silent but opening up, seemingly waiting for a new generation to make it its own.

Watching my children playing under the last warm rays of the November sun in the garden, I tried to imagine what the same garden looks like under a big moonlight. It made me think of the fossils I talked about recently, and of the light of distant stars, which comes to us a long time after they’re gone.

Photography is making testimonies of the past one at a time, with every new photograph as soon as it is made. It has an obvious and strong relationship to the other kind of investigative endeavors about time. History, archaeology, paleontology, but also detective and journalism work. Is an old house, that looks like the inhabitants just left for a vacation and never came back, like a life size photograph? Or a play field for the detective or the reporter? I am neither, I am after the impossible, a failed reporter of the invisible world.

Still, I can’t help but wonder. Who inhabited the house, who were they? In the end, the picture is missing, there’s no portrait in the frame.

It seems to me that the house has stopped broadcasting its music long ago. I can’t hear it. But it’s not difficult to imagine the future sound of the music, and the laughters that will soon echo in it. The “haha” sounds yet to be uttered.

Old houses, future archives, family albums, records for the book lovers.

Past images, future sounds, but life is right now.