‘Photographs are skin’ says George Szirtes in The Photographer at Sixteen. His writing penetrates the surface skin and the still images come alive, begin to move, turn into a film. His contemplation of these images reminds me of the writing of John Berger when he looks deeply at something, whether it’s a photograph a painting or an object. He reads its history, its intentions, its desires and dreams. George Szirtes enters his own past with the help of photographs, and lets them sift through his imagination, and approach as far as he can, his mother’s world. George is a poet, he travels easily with metaphor and association, and he weaves his imaginative world into the facts as he knows them, facts of family life and residence, and facts that are uncovered later by talking to his father after his mother’s death, facts about her life that he did not know when she was alive.
‘...what a simple world it is
that lets in someone at the door
and sees a pair of lives go down
high hollow stairs into the rain
that’s falling softly on the town.’
(p 144)
He mentions a particular courtyard in Budapest he ‘fell in love with’, and includes a photograph. This reminds me of a similar courtyard in Budapest, discovered when I visited that city a few years ago. I had never seen anything like it. Once the huge main door closed behind me, the noise of the busy street I’d come in from was shut out. An inner world opened up, one you would never have guessed existed, from the outside. A secret door into another world, A quiet, peaceful and lovely interior.
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| Courtyard off
Rákóczi
ut,Budapest |
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| Same courtyard, in daylight |
In a similar way, George Szirtes, through photographs, memories and imagination, opens doors into the inner world that was his mother’s life.
Images of Budapest (from a visit a few years ago)
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| Outside Mai Mano House of Photography |
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| Mai Mano entrance |
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| Inside Mai Mano |
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| Pink flowers, pink facade |
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