The ‘Lost’ Photographs of James Burke

In one of her many essays, Charmian Clift writes of the melancholic experience of feeling like a photograph. She has been asked to address a group of students at Wollongong High School, a school she had attended, and in preparing her speech she turns to a photograph that appears in the school’s fiftieth-anniversary commemorative booklet. The photograph depicts a class from Clift’s time at the school, ‘formally posed with the boys lined up behind the girls and their hands resting on the girls’ shoulders’ (‘On Turning slightly Sepia’, p. 48 (see References below)), and as photographs do it evokes in Clift’s memory small details that are not evidenced in the image itself: ‘I can still see one of those girls arched in a perfect swallow dive, and remember precisely a collar of little pearl buttons on a blue crepe dress that another of them wore to an end-of-term dance that year‘(48). The photograph also prompts Clift to consider how different her teenage circumstances were from those of the students she is to speak to, their faces shining with the confidence that faith in the goodness of the future affords. Before those faces now momentarily turned to her, she thinks of herself as the past, and wonders, ‘if they realized that standing up before them I knew myself to be curling at the edges and turning slightly sepia’ (51).

That Clift calls on the metaphor of the photograph to imagine her own image, frozen in and subject to time before youthful eyes, is prescient, because the impression that comes to us today of Clift is drawn in part from what we see of her in photographs—beautiful, intense and dreamy—and belongs determinedly to a world of pre-digital photography. After all, pixels neither curl nor turn sepia, unless of course you use Photoshop to produce the effect in order to draw on some of the nostalgic resonance and historical authority of the pre­ digital artefact. It is interesting too that some of Clift’s writing might be thought to entertain a photographic quality. In Peel me a lotus (1959), the memoir that deals with the first year she, George Johnston and their family lived on the Greek island of Hydra, Clift writes at times with the descriptive precision of a documentary photographer as she dwells on the town’s physical beauty: