LOST BUT FOUND

I don’t remember any of these photos being taken…

But there I am, looking like butter wouldn’t melt, in a kitchen I don’t recall.

Some things come back. Sometimes it’s very evocative. Fragrances, moments, my favourite clothes.

And in my case, earlobes!

I had a thing for earlobes.

Don’t worry. I don’t do it anymore.

Rediscovering these images got me thinking about how strange memory is.

We take our childhood and our memories for granted; assuming we’ll be able to retrieve moments from our immense filing system, aka the brain.

But it’s never that easy.

Time brings a haze, and eventually a fog.

And the funny thing is, childhood itself seems to flash by in a blur. The days can feel long when you’re in the thick of them, but the years have a habit of disappearing. The memories may fade, but the photographs remain.

I was thinking about this recently when writing Why Birthdays Are My Favourite. Birthdays are a reminder of just how quickly life moves — and how important it is to hold on to the moments that make it memorable.

It’s called childhood amnesia.

Yes, I rabbit-holed. As usual.

Most adults have very few autobiographical memories of their first three or four years. In my case, more.

Children do remember things, from around the age of three onwards but as they get older some of those memories become inaccessible.

It’s not necessarily that they were never there.

We just can’t reach them anymore.

Photographs are the bridge.

The clue that sets off the memory banks. Small time machines, bringing back vague echoes of something we thought we had lost.

Suddenly, I can almost remember the dress I loved.

The feel of my swimming armbands tight around my skin.

My ballet shoes.

Mum’s perfume.

Not necessarily the whole memory. Sometimes just a feeling. A sensation. A tiny fragment.

I feel a little bit sad that I don’t have those moments in my head with the clarity I have for last week.

However, each time I look at these images, I think about how sweet childhood is — and how blessed I am that these photographs have survived through the decades.

With the advance of modern storage, it’s even easier to have a scroll through the past. To choose the ones we love and print them. To have electronic picture frames quietly rotating through these carefree shards of time.

Perhaps we don’t just take photographs for the people we are today.

We take them for the adults our children will become.

Aren’t we lucky to be preserved for our future selves?

If there’s one thing these old photographs have reminded me of, it’s how much the seemingly ordinary moments can mean years later. A portrait or a family photograph might feel like just another picture today, but one day it could become a little time machine of your own.

You can find out more about my family photography and portrait photography in London.