Harley Davies
May 2020 was two months into lockdown and personal tragedies were being reported daily on our news screens. Unrelated to the pandemic but still a deeply traumatic moment for me was the sad loss of my grandfather. He died in 2020 from cancer.
He was the elder of our family and we all truly respected him as a man who deserved this title in the traditional and respectful sense. He was a great listener and always offered the best advice, he supported each and every one of us in his own way, and when it was needed, his wit was a tonic.
Looking through the family albums at this time and sharing memories with relatives as we Irish are known to do, it struck me that this was a power that belonged to photography. We looked at pictures as a way of remembering a life and celebrating my grandfather’s existence. All of a sudden, I knew that this would be the work I would focus on for my degree. I wanted to turn this negative moment into a positive. A way of honouring my grandfather by investigating his life in pictures. The subject for me would be familial photography, which has in many ways been a constant driver for my work over many years. Since childhood and my first camera, my passion has always been to photograph those who are closest to me.
I set about getting in touch with relatives and friends who, like most Irish families, cover the globe in their re-rooting. Pictures started arriving in my inbox, stories and recollections accompanied them. The journey was becoming therapeutic. It was like I was with my grandfather again, imagining his life through images I had never seen before.
What I have learned on this journey is that photography is so much more than making the world look pretty. Even the most harrowing images that come from war torn, famine struck parts of the world play to the idea of beauty and professionalism. The family album is something else. They are the pictures that we take to record a moment, to remember the day, to show that we were there, together. Their beauty lies in their meaning to us. For families everywhere, These images were once only available as physical objects and so were rarely seen outside of the family home. Technology has changed all of this so that now, the modern family albums exist in our social accounts, but technology has also opened the door to the rest of it. These archives of family photographs are now entering the public domain and the significance of this for future study is vast. For me, it was just about my grandad, and I hope he knows how much I’ve learned by looking at his pictures.
