The biting loss of what we were in still pictures

Johanna Karanja has kept family photos from decades gone. PHOTO | WILLIAM RUTHI

What you need to know:

  • Among the pictures lost were some taken by the old photographer, dating back to 1973. They had his imprint, his postal address.
  • When I met him I carried the photograph he took of me when I was 72 hours old.
  • After you have been in the creative arts for some time and have ever taken a liking for history, you don’t recover from the loss of two full photo albums.

When the water, or whatever liquid it was that had spilt onto the two photo albums dried up, it carried all the memories with it. The albums had been in storage in one of the drawers of what rural folk refer to as a ‘sideboard’- which is actually a glorified cupboard, where the finer cutlery and porcelain lounge.

The damage was final, and later when I pulled out a black-and-white picture of my mother in the years when she was ‘happening’, it crumbled into a light-brown ash. Gone was nearly a full century worth of frozen memories. Gone were baptism scenes presided over by Italian priests; scenes of wedding ceremonies, the most memorable being a rare colour picture of my mother holding aloft an earthen pot that soon slipped from her hands right there in front of the gathered witnesses.

Gone were graveside scenes of departures and mounds of earth and sadness; pictures of innocence and missing teeth. Gone too was the picture of my grandfather with his Indian employer in Parklands, Nairobi. It was the last picture he took before he left the city for good. He wore a plaid shirt, but it was the look in his eyes that I remember most: There was sadness, as if he was about to be thrust into an entirely new world.

Gone too was the picture of Tom the dog, he of unknown parentage, and the most faithful of dogs anywhere. Poor Tom, who we discovered dead a few months after his picture was taken together with all of us because he was one of us; the picture where I stood with the last of the toy buses cut out from a used metal cooking-oil tin.

PHOTOGRAPHS DIED WITH STORIES

After you have been in the creative arts for some time and have ever taken a liking for history, you don’t recover from the loss of two full photo albums. You try and recreate what is gone forever; you try and recapture it in words. You try to bandage and cobble back to existence rolls of film. You are standing at the shore, gazing out into the blue sea and the smoke of a ship sailing in the distance. The manifest is gone.

When the photo albums died, they took with them all stories.

There was a time, not even that long ago, when the photo album was an item of prestige and pride. It was more than that; the album was the equivalent of the green room — the place where guests about to go on air sit to kill the nerves and the flutter of butterflies, where the handlers reassure the guests that the studio is quite like your sitting room.

In the same way, the album was a briefing, an introduction to visitors before the host poured out tea: “You see this? This was us on our first outing,” and “See how plump she was!” Here: “We’ve travelled a long road. People come from far.” It was an honoured routine, but mostly, beleaguered guests really just wished the kettle arrived faster. You can only remember so many names. The album was the mezzanine floor.

A collection of photo albums that survived the destruction. PHOTO | WILLIAM RUTHI

THE BRAVE NEW WORLD

When the mobile phone became smart, it changed the world. In a few short years, what had taken a century to build — the world with its borders and seas and oceans and languages and age — disappeared. The phone did something else: It carved photographers out of anyone who could press or touch the shutter.

Yet, there is trouble there. Research reveals that despite the volumes of pictures captured every day, the documentation rate is jarringly low.

“There is this feeling that, I have all these photos, somehow I will always have them,” a professional photographer and blogger told me. “There is danger there, because you can lose an entire folder of pictures should you lose your phone, or if the storage card is compromised.”

ONE LAST PICTURE

He went on: “You know, this might sound morbid, but no matter how many ‘happy’ pictures we are able to make, at the back of the mind is one last picture, an official proper portrait that we want to appear in the funeral programme. You understand?”

In the wake of the staggering discovery of the defaced pictures, I sought out a man who, since the late 1960s, had been committing people and their various events and ceremonies to memory, if not immortality. He had held onto the old ways, even as the world galloped into new ways.

He had been chagrined by the quality of micro-waved pictures from laser printers now ubiquitous at all public functions. He spoke longingly of the good old departed Fuji and Kodak films. Eventually, even he had to give up his mule for the racecourse horse. “It is never going to be the same again,” he told me resignedly. “What to do? It is what it is.”

Among the pictures lost were some taken by the old photographer, dating back to 1973. They had his imprint, his postal address. When I met him I carried the photograph he took of me when I was 72 hours old.

He had been summoned the cot-side to commit my debut to film memory in the town hospital across the river just outside Othaya town. It was one of the few pictures that were unharmed; I had had it framed.

IN STILL MEMORY

There is an old man who lives in a tiny one-roomed rented house in Kabete sub-county in Kiambu. He turns 101 years this year. He was featured in the Nation in 2017, the year he finally gave up his decades-long trade of catching moles. Johanna Karanja lives alone, and has been for many, many years.

His mind is sharp as to be a walking encyclopaedia. He loves nothing more than telling the story of his life, and even if he didn’t, one only needs to see his room. Framed pictures bedeck the walls, hanging amid rosaries.

The framed pictures chronicle his eventful life; from his days as a carpenter, and then as a mole trapper. The walls are storyboards; he is a story. Before I left, Johanna gave me a picture of his younger brother Ayub Mburu, a man of sorrows. The picture was dated 1962, and in it Ayub, a travelling preacher, wears a flowing white robe, a big palm hide drum by his side. He is about to climb onto his bicycle. It is from his bicycle that he fell to his death in 1964.

But he was still alive, in his brother’s memory in this photo that outlived him.

Words have not yet been invented that can replace a photograph; you can only conjure up what memory has chosen to be remembered.

The pictures that remain are those that I digitised while creating a video commemoration of my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary. The short video loops on the song ‘Precious Memories’ by Allan Jackson.

Precious memories; good friends we had, good friends we lost. When the albums washed out, they carried with them friends. From the family tree, twigs fell, and they would never grow back. How does one bandage memory back to life?