letter #40

we're all making our own sense of things: the nostalgia for the fax machine edition

My dear friend

I have been sifting through photographs for a family birthday celebration.

At times like this I always wish that I had made good on the promise I have made to myself on endless to-do lists over the years: sort photos. But there it always is, alongside plant garden and finish novel. Like you, my photographs sit almost in halves between the analogue and digital divide. But a bunch of the analogue albums have gone missing, I suspect lost in the latest move. This has led me to go overboard with the saving and re-saving of digital photos. Folders of digital photographs are saved on CD-Rs (whatever they are), CDs, USB sticks, hard drives, clouds with varying levels of subscriptions, old laptops, new laptops, old phones…the result of this is that it feels like the (estimated) several thousand photographs is in fact several hundreds of thousands of photographs and if ever I do sit down to sort them into themes or to take out duplicates, I have no idea where to begin.

But because of the way that the digital world works, they are mostly available to me in chronological order, and as I was scrolling through the early naughts, I was struck by the tangible shift in aesthetic when we started blogging (for me, this was 2006, but as in so many things you were far ahead of me in this). So many of the photos were clearly taken with potential blog posts in mind. On blogspot our lives were defined by fewer faces and more fleeting moments.

Holding on:

Vignettes of life with child

Silhouettes:

The early digital cameras weren’t that great, and editing software, when we used it at all, was basic. But the aesthetic of fleeting moments is clear.

My funeral work has left me fascinated by the aesthetics of photographs. It’s one of my favourite parts of any funeral, the slideshow, the whole room lost in memories. I love that the slideshow is simultaneously singular and collective. That it is undeniably about the person who has died, here she is with her mother, her father, wearing that dress, graduating with honours in economics, leaving for London, bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding. And yet, because of fashion and aesthetics you could take any collection of photographs of two people born at the same time and in the same place and substitute them and still give a general sense of their lives. (I still do hope that our box of photographs turns up so that at my funeral my kids are using photos of actual me rather than the generalised me).

Then, just as has happened on instagram, there was a fracturing between these simple photos taken with simple equipment and the more curated form and blogging meant more than one thing. Blogging in the way that you and I did it was lovely while it lasted, but there’s no point anymore feeling nostalgic for blogging, hoping it might make a comeback. We are so far into middle age that even our nostalgia is old-fashioned, and these days the millenials and even the zoomers are all talking about the ways that instagram isn’t the same.

Anyway, it’s not blogspot I’m truly nostalgic for, it’s the fax machine. There was a lot to love in the Michael Hutchence documentary Mystify, but what I loved the most was hearing Kylie Minogue talk about the coded faxes she and Michael Hutchence sent to each other. With a fax, you could send your own handwriting to someone, and when they wrote back, you got their handwriting in return. This made faxes the perfect blend of the instant and the personal. Add to this the quality of the thermo paper, which made them only semi-permanent. Even as you sent it, your fax was fading to ephemera. What a potent blend of human interaction the fax could be.

None of this is any of what I intended to tell you when I started writing, and now I’ve run out of time to get to the point. But I’ve got a little treat I can give you instead of insight or meaning. The treat takes the form of a most unexpected find in my photo collection.

A few weeks ago, when I launched the show of my restitched, unstitched wedding dress, some of my friends came all the way to Port Pirie. I prepared a little itinerary of places they could visit. A drive past my childhood home, a trip over The Bridge to Nowhere, a visit to Meg’s Bookshop. ‘And don’t forget Memorial Park,’ I said. ‘That’s where we all went to see Charles and Diana when they came on their visit.’ ‘Charles and Diana? In Port Pirie?’ My friends were skeptical, thinking I was trying to make my childhood sound much more interesting than it was. But here is a photograph of a photograph that someone sent me a couple of years ago, thinking I might like it. Charles and Diana standing in a car, and Dad—yes, my dad—in the background. He was there because all of the teachers in the town were there, supervising all of us, making sure we didn’t do anything unruly. My guess would be that lanyard around his neck says ‘Republic Now.’

That’s not at all what you were expecting when you opened this letter, is it? How can it be? It’s not at all where I thought it would go when I started writing. But here we are at the logical end of the letter despite having settled on any conclusion.

It has only been a week since I last wrote, so I expect it will now be six months until I write again. Until then, I hope that your days are peaceful, your nights are gentle, and your coffee is always exactly the strength you need it.

With love, your friend

Tracy xx