Girl in the Photograph

When my friend Barbara heard a descrip­tion of this pho­to­graph of a friend’s aunt taken when the aunt was nine years old, some­time in the early 1950s near the town of Barrington, Nova Scotia, she was put strongly in mind of her own mother, who had grown up in Nova Scotia and who used to tell sto­ries of catch­ing fish when she was a girl. Barbara asked her friend to send her a copy of the pho­to­graph, and although she didn’t know the girl with the fish, whose name is Ola Coffin, and there is noth­ing in the land­scape that might be iden­ti­fied as “Nova Scotian,” much that Barbara had known of her mother was con­firmed for her in the image of the girl with the bare knees hold­ing up a trout that she had caught on the way home from school. As pho­tographs grow old they evolve into arti­facts of gen­eral mem­ory: they await a moment in the future, such as this one with Barbara, that emerges from the pho­to­graphic uncon­scious. Last year a national news­pa­per spon­sored a pho­tog­ra­phy con­test on the theme of “My Canada”: among the sub­mis­sions were many pho­tographs of men and boys hold­ing up the fish that they had just caught. None of the sub­mis­sions were pho­tographs of women or girls hold­ing up fish that they had caught.

To read Stephen Osborne’s Letter to Subscribers about this pho­to­graph and the Geist Memory Project, click here.