The Ruins of Memory

It's funny how sometimes the serendipity of random internet trawling can bring focus to otherwise dim or lost memory, much like a long-forgotten and recently rediscovered family photograph. I was prompted by a random Pinterest notification to head to an article on a site called Creative Boom, as it featured photographs taken in Stourbridge in the 1970s, by a photographer called John Myers. I recognised the images in the piece, but the guy's name was lost to my memory, like so much else as I progress through time. The irony of it of course, is that he was a lecturer at my college who must have been intrinsically involved with my work during my final year and degree show there. Looking very hard at a recent-ish photo of him on his Wikipedia page, I can now visualise the guy in his early thirties, as he would have been then, who must have had input into what I was doing during that last frantic term [semester] before my show, when I somehow managed to turn impending disaster into an actual, cogent exhibition and decent degree. There are so many strands to my thoughts about the function and functionality of the photographic image, that have been whirling about in my head since that time, that I'm fast reaching the point when I need to get at least some of it down in a cohered form. But I have to pay tribute to a writer - whose piece is pictured above centre - Txetxu Aguado, who has coined the phrase 'Photographs contain ruins of memory...' which has set my mind racing still further afield. I'm only too aware - and sadly reminded by today's news of the death of an old friend and colleague, Kevin Swain - that tempus doth indeed fugit, and bloody sharpish at our age; so I think I should just crack on with this putative literary project before I too join him in the hereafter, should it actually be a thing...