"Unusually for pre-smartphone times, my camera-crazy father had extensively documented our lives, filling dozens of photo albums. What could the transparencies possibly reveal that we hadn't already seen countless times? I dimly remembered him ambushing us to watch slideshows, until we were old enough to rebel. My father died in 2012. Not long before, I had developed an interest in photography myself and, after he was gone, I found solace in my viewfinder."
"What prompted me to set up my iPad as a makeshift lightbox to view the slides was technical interest. One of the first images out of the box was of my mother and me on the tarmac at Heathrow airport. We are about to board an Air India plane to Kolkata. We had lots of photos from that holiday, all of them black and white prints, conventional snaps, but I had never seen this epic photo before."
"My father came to Glasgow from India to finish his medical training in 1958 and, a few years later, met my mother who was a nurse at the same hospital. On this trip, my mother would meet her in-laws for the first time, and I my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Until that point in my four-year-old life, India had loomed large in my mind as an enchanted kingdom."
A box of Kodachrome slides yielded an unexpected, powerful family image. The camera-obsessed father had extensively documented family life, and photography became a solace after his 2012 death. Using an iPad as a makeshift lightbox revealed a striking transparency of the narrator and the mother on the tarmac at Heathrow about to board an Air India flight to Kolkata. The father had emigrated to Glasgow in 1958 for medical training and later met the mother, a nurse. The trip introduced relatives and contrasted childhood fantasies of India with ordinary holiday memories, while the mother appears stylish and distant in the image.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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