Childhood, 2007 - Agence VU'

Childhood, 2007

Vincent Migeat

This entire story begins with a little framed picture, which was at my wife parents’ home. This picture was put down on an old secretaire, and one day I tend to photograph it. When I examined it more precisely, I discover a strange thing…

The seventh birthday

It’s a small family picture, pretty common actually, like the ones we often see in every family album or the ones in a good place on the home chimney. It was a portrait. There were the father, the mother and the two sons. Everybody was dressed to kill, it was an important day, a birthday. This photograph is meaningless in its composition and yet exceptional. With a closer look, when approaching, when scrutinizing the two little boys that stand between the mother and father, something does not seem right; this picture is tricked, yes tricked. Somebody has been added.

The little boy on the right side, it’s my mother-in-law’s father between his parents. They went downtown and visited the best photographer in town. They paused in a calculated way, letting a room for their first boy, dead seven years earlier from a bad hit in the belly at school. And then, they handed a portrait of him so that the photographer could add it to the portrait. (“You can do that, can’t you?”)

This picture is disturbing because it asked a central question in photography: time and death, disturbing because it shows and expresses better than long speeches the dreadful and unquenchable suffering of parents facing the loss of a child.

And then, I had children myself. A girl first, that we named Adèle, and then, a few years later, a boy, Simon. Very naturally, like any Dad, I took pictures of their first steps, their first smiles, their first days at school. A bit to garnish the family album, a bit too to remember those unique moments and save some slices on the side for later.

After a few years, I realized that those pictures were going further than just a family portrait and that it could have a photographic interest. So I keep on chronicling day by day their own evolutions.
I would like never to stop and one day give them a proper family album.

I am thinking again to this strange photo, admittedly morbid, but so moving, and to all the wonderful pictures along the pages of the album. It’s a neglected aspect of photography, often despised, but maybe one of the most important. Taking part of the construction of a family memory.

ARCHIVES CONTACT