January 2010 - Juliette 

Text, selected failed photograph (courtesy of the artist's friend G.Salabert-Mougin), Digital prints (59 x 84 cm)

 Transcript:

To: Juliette <juliette31@gmail.com>

25 January 2035   10:47

How have you been my darling? I haven’t heard from you for quite some time. Winter has been treating us badly here. We’ve had so much snow that the city was at a standstill for almost a week. How is it over there?

I‘ve embarked on an ambitious project: sorting out all our family photographs. Most of them are digital and have never been printed. We’re lucky we still have them. So I’ve decided to select and print some of them to create some kind of family archive, with a box for each of you. When your father and I met, we told one another our life stories by going through photographs we had each brought with us when we moved to New York. I am sure you’ll tell me that this box is the story of Juliette according to her mother and that your story is different. You’ll probably be right. Nevertheless, the box will be waiting for you. 

I found this photograph of you. I felt compelled to enlarge it and I placed the print in the alcove above my desk in the library. I look at it very often. 

It was taken from afar. As a result, the photograph is slightly out-of-focus. Seated straight and tall against the backdrop of a blue velvet curtain, you are playing the violin. You are wearing a beautiful red velvet dress embroidered with white flowers. You may remember it. You loved it so much that you wore it long after you outgrew it. A soft strand of hair has fallen onto your forehead. The camera caught your gaze, hovering above the audience, looking towards the back of the room, at me perhaps. The bow is floating in front of you, as the camera failed to capture the movement of your forearm and your hand. Everything and everybody else was framed out. It is you only, my little girl, at the age of eight, embalmed in this photographic present.

The snapshot hit me in the silent flow of digital photographs opening on my computer screen. It reached me deeper than all those fragments of the small and big events of our life as a family. 

Perhaps its muteness is more deafening than the others’. I cannot remember what piece you played although I recall the occasion: the year three Christmas concert at Saint Mary’s. We were so proud of you. You spent so many hours training for that moment. What an accomplishment. 

Perhaps it’s your gaze drilling through the flat digital surface of the photograph. Or it’s the blur failing forever at performing the dancing movement of the bow vibrating your violin strings.  Thinking about it, I believe it’s the paradoxical combination of the two. The timeless portrait quality of your face and gaze contrasts with the desperate urgency of the blur failing at petrifying the movement of your hand with the bow. I find the conflation of the here-again of the photograph with the nevermore of the referent exquisitely unbearable. My mother’s sister who died when she was forty used to cry when she looked at family snapshots. I have always thought she only saw them as signifiers of death. I prefer looking at them as celebrations of life, precious tokens of your existence as a child, of the time and love I provided for you, of all the work it represented for me. I remember my obsession with taking pictures on my phone. I felt every moment, trivial or significant, had to be taken, abducted, kept preciously in a secure place from which I could safely retrieve the past and make it present and real again.  

Perhaps this is why most of them stayed digital. They are always on the verge of becoming.  They are between the event and the memory of the event, a stasis of life. I find it reassuring knowing they’re there. They are props for remembering the particular absolute of these wonderful and often challenging moments I have lived because of you. They are strange transitional objects that help me to accept you have grown and gone.

I can imagine your face now, raising your eyebrows, wondering whether to worry or not. Don’t. I really would like to see you soon.

Love.

Maman