In the Dark Room by Brian Dillon

Author:Brian Dillon [Brian Dillon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781910695739
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2018-06-18T04:00:00+00:00

¶ Studio

I put aside this first instance of my own photographic history and began to concentrate on an image of my father. He is aged about seven: the occasion is his First Communion, and he is photographed in a studio, looking so like me over forty years later that, having misplaced my own Communion photos, I can still picture them hovering just below the surface of this one, identical in almost every detail. I found this photograph not long after my father died, and although I’d been reminded all my life of my resemblance to him, I was still shocked to discover the extent of the similarity between our seven-year-old selves. In fact, I half suspected that I’d been dressed, in the early summer of 1976, precisely to replicate this photograph. Certainly, no other child I knew had suffered the bizarre indignity of a tailor-made, short-trousered, three-piece suit, and as I looked at my father’s costume – only a handkerchief and the barely visible clip of a pen in his top pocket distinguished his get-up from my own – I felt as if he’d perpetrated a bitter practical joke across the decades.

On the reverse of the print, a date has been stamped in purple ink – ‘23 May’ – but the year is illegible. My dating of this image is thus imprecise, though I have always imagined that the year is 1935. But as my father was born in November of 1928, this would place the photograph – assuming that he was seven years old at the time of his First Communion – somewhere in 1936. And so, by this simple belated recalculation, my father’s image begins to edge a little closer to the earliest photograph of my mother. The studio photograph, pictured, as the reverse of the image informs me, ‘by the Owl Studio’ (the first and last letters of the studio’s name are the eyes of a pair of birds in profile: eyes almost as wide as those of my father on the other side). A vaguely defined backdrop hovers behind the young boy: an odd combination of two looming trompe-l’oeil trees or bushes and a black-and-white-squared tiled floor receding into the distance. The scene abuts awkwardly and unconvincingly an intricately patterned carpet on which stands a small table with a glass vase full of flowers. My father’s hand grips the leading corner of the table, his arm held stiffly in his suit; from his short trousers his legs descend in pale socks and highly polished shoes. The white rosette in his lapel is overexposed and glares out from his dark jacket like a puff of white ectoplasm in a spiritualist photograph of half a century earlier. He holds his head awkwardly above a collar which looks stiff and too new. His hair has been plastered to one side (which recalls my father’s insistence on painfully scraping my hair into the same style for my Communion photo). Palely glaring towards the photographer with a look that is half

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