Captioning and Capturing the Past

Writing photo captions to develop personal memoir

Robert Root, Department of English, Central Michigan University

<http:www.chsbs.cmich.edu/Robert_Root>

a better reader of images a better user of images as writing

resources

This task aims to make you:

draw upon images that you have stored in your minds, stuffed in wallets, and tacked on pin boards or fridges in order to trigger memory, develop description, spark reflection.

This task asks you to:

To help you capture the past…

‘caption’ images that open

windows into the past.

The Earl of Ilchester’s library, 1941

Detailed close description brings much more than appearances to the surface: Context – the surrounding circumstances of

a picture Perspective – from the objectivity of looking

back into the past, exploring different points of view

Meaning – underlying ideas, emotions and themes arise from the work of expression

On "Italian soldier after end of fighting, Sicily, 1943" by Robert Capa

The hot Mediterranean landscape. Dust on the bicycle tires. Sun on her tanned arms. Their shadows mingling. The sizzle of cicadas, the slow whir of the bicycle. The photograph would be diminished without that bicycle; it would be ruined without her long hair.  Her hair tells us: This is how she was when he left; she has not changed; she has remained true to him.  She asks about the things that have happened to him; he is hesitant at first, but there is no hurry.  Eventually, he tells her of the friends he has lost, the terrible things he has seen.  He is impatient for news of friends and relatives back in their village.  She tells about her brother who was also in the army, about the funny thing that happened with the schoolteacher and the butcher's dog.

Geoff DyerCivilization (October/November 1997): p.100

On a photograph of her mother and herself, 1941

My 27-year-old father, Frederic Oates, "Freddy," taking snapshots of my mother and me on this sunny afternoon, is worried about being drafted into the army; in the meantime he's working at Harrison Radiator, a division of General Motors in Lockport, New York, involved in what is unofficially believed to be “defence work” (airplanes).  It's a tense, unpredictable era in our history, yet such global turbulence is remote from the grassy backyard of our family home in Millersport, New York; here is a leafy, spacious world, in which my 24-year-old mother, Carolina, and I, an inquisitive child of three years 11 months, appear to be playing with new-born kittens.  How happy we must have seemed to that long-lost "Joyce Carol," with little more vexing in her life than the ordeal of having curly hair combed free of snarls and prettily fixed with a ribbon, and being "dressed up" for some adult special occasion. . . .

Memory is our domestic form of time travel.  The invention of photography – in particular, the “snapshot” – revolutionized human consciousness, for when we claim to “remember” our pasts, we are surely remembering our favourite snapshots, in which the long-faded past is given a distinct visual immortality.  Just as art provides answers long before we understand the questions, so, too, our relationship with our distant past, in particular our relationship with our parents, is a phenomenon we come to realize only by degrees, as we too age, across the mysterious abyss of time.

Joyce Carol Oates"Caption," Civilization (February/March 1997): p.96

Vivir Para Contarla*

By ‘captioning’ the images of your life, you can develop strategies that will help you to capture – and write – your past

* Living to Tell the Tale – title of the Nobel Prize winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s memoir

On a photograph of his wife and daughters, Darwin, November 1996

Having dragged my young family over 2,000 km into the tropical north to pursue a teaching career, I tried to capture an ephemeral moment of simple pleasure. Eleanor aged 6½ and Philomena aged 2½, read over their mother’s shoulder a book on fancy dress. The scene has curiously personal reverberations of childhood innocence. The dining table setting of a pyramid of oranges, de rigueur in Mary’s home economy of fresh fruit, her red stripped house dress and even her broad lensed glasses, all echo the primary colours of 1970’s fashion that adorn the book they read. These are the same colours I remember my mother wearing in her house full of men. With four sons and not a single daughter, she had no opportunity to share such feminine maternal moments.

November begins the nightmarish ‘build-up’ in Darwin that precedes the sanity saving release of the Wet, three hellish months later. They look oblivious to such seasonal torment, despite their inevitable sheen of sweat: Eleanor’s sweetly precocious pose of seriously amused contemplation on one side; Philomena’s unconstrained laughter on the right. Fancy dress in a tropical climate suggests to me the colonial madness of our British forebears. Was this some mad dream I had, dragging my wife kicking and screaming to paradise? Was I repeating my own parents’ doomed exodus away from family in Adelaide? My daughters appear oblivious to such tensions between past and future, climate and place. Their joy in the moment is far more precious to me than any possible answer to such questions.

Jonathan Scobie

On a photograph of his mother and son, Christmas 2004

Aidan at five and my mother at seventy five seem to epitomise the spirit of Christmas. While her Alzheimer's does not appear in the photograph, there is an irony in her being there at all. If her memory were intact, she would have no doubt clung to the same old disgruntled disappointments that kept her absent from so many of my children’s Christmases past.

Aidan plays the wise Fool in cap and grin. What is my mother’s role? A Mrs Scrooge with another Tiny Tim? After the three ghosts of Christmas, what visitations remain to haunt her decaying remembrance?

Jonathan Scobie

1. First response: "It is a picture from my childhood. I was probably about three,

maybe four. I am lying in my pyjamas fast asleep in a dresser drawer."

2. Journal entry: The student now includes the picture’s date of February 1983,

when she was "a month shy of age three."  She writes, "I am wearing floral printed pyjamas.  These pyjamas were most likely created by my grandmother, like many of my childhood clothes were. The dresser I am sleeping in was made from Grandfather's own crafty hands." 

These are good details, which emerge from the student trying to write about what she sees. They aren't part of the earlier response, which is acceptably vague and brief.

A student writer’s example:

In the journal entry she writes, "I am huddled up in the foetal position cuddling with my favourite blanket."  She remembers that she called the blanket her Binky and that she was eight or nine before her mother made her give it up.  Then her description of herself reveals the underlying reason this picture has meaning for her…

A student writer’s example:

I am in a peaceful slumber.  I am in my own childlike cocoon.  Sometimes I wish I could go back to my childlike cocoon.  My mother once told me that on that day she had thought she lost me.  She searched the whole house up and down screaming my name aloud.  I of course had blocked out the confusion around me.  Now I realize it's time for me to wake up from my cocoon and face the confusion head on.

A student writer’s example:

she talks about trying to "slowly and carefully break away from the shelters my parents have put around me," how she rose above the barriers in adolescence and was gently guided back to shelter.  She concludes,

I am beginning to wake from peaceful slumber and realize it's time to grow up and face reality.  It's time for me to give up the cosy comfort of 'Binky' and break away from the enclosing shelter of the drawer. 

As a First Year University student living away from home in college, she uses her analysis of this photograph to get at both why she treasures the picture and how it connects to deep-seated and important issues for her, about separation, about independence, about the difference between being nurtured and being constrained.

In the remainder of the journal entry…

freedom to explore your photos in your own ways

an opportunity to share experiences and ideas as a class

preparation for the first summative Text Production task – a fully developed personal essay

A caption journal entry gives you: