Something, but not everything, of a life
By Dave Taylor
10 Jun 2008
My 50th birthday in 2006 gave me an excuse to find and then forage through boxes and boxes of photographs taken of me throughout my life.
It's not often that I focus the lens on myself, preferring to photograph other people, and places. So rummaging through these dusty boxes was a self-indulgence not often exercised.
And it is interesting to me now, two years later, to go through the photographs that I had selected for an unscreened birthday party slideshow. Some of the photographs I scanned quickly and clumsily, but I like the dirty effect. The dust on the scanner is almost, if you'll forgive the analogy, like the dust of time.
Perhaps my favourite photograph is the earliest one of my brother and I with the department store Santa. My mum is behind the scenes, holding me, as she so often held me for so much of my life. She died in 2000 and this picture reminds me that photographs can tell something, but sadly not everything, of a life. In this series I have credited the photographers where I can remember them.
