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December 26, 2010
I'm down at Victor Harbor cleaning and painting the weekender with Suzanne over the Xmas break so that friends can use it for a couple of weeks for their summer holiday. We had Xmas day off from the spring clean.
Since the weather has been too windy for large format photography on the coast, I have been going through my archives and wondering about the archive in relation to memory; or rather the loss of memory.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Xmas in the Coorong, 1997
I realize that one aspect of photography is concerned with using the archive in a struggle against the loss of memory, an attempt to archive and preserve what is about to disappear for good. This dimension of photography is associated with mourning of what has been and what may be forgotten.
In this case it is the Xmas Suzanne and spent camping in the Coorong in the year her mother died. The house, once so full of family life, was now so empty. It made Suzanne lonely and she wanted to get away from it. Hence Xmas in the Coorong. It was a way to mourn---the death of her mother, a way to guard against that mourning, and a living on.
Update
We arrived back in Adelaide late Wednesday morning (29th) utterly sick of cleaning and painting the weekender. There was no time for photography or for going through the photographic archive.
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