Photography, memory, liminal spaces

Greta finds a second-hand camera to use, and enjoys walking the property with it, and developing her own photographs. It helps her to familiarise herself with the new place, and perhaps more than she knows, helps her to piece together the stories that keep coming to her through memory and imagination.

It’s a metaphor for how anyone sees the world – through the lens of their own family and cultural heritage. She’s well aware of it, and how we interpret the world by the particular slant we put on a situation, how we frame it and bring in our experiences. ‘It’s all about the way you see things,’ Greta remembers her photographer mother saying.

There’s a ghostly element to Greta’s photographs – she only takes black and white. So there’s that question of distortion, taking out colour so all you have is shadow and light. For me it highlights that you’re capturing a moment which is no longer real.

I find an eerie magic in the old method of developing photos, too. The photographic paper looks as if nothing is there, but once it passes through the chemicals, an image comes up like a dream out of nothing, a latent memory being coaxed forward.

‘The poison water looked otherworldly in its ethereal projection and the dim orange light. And again when it appeared in the developer tray with the spiky pandanus and dark trees around it.

‘It’s like a memory,’ said Toby. ‘Or a daydream.’ (p102, The Curlew’s Eye)

Questions:

How did you interpret Greta’s use of a camera and photography in the novel?

What other artworks, films or poems & stories do you know where photography is a metaphor for our unconscious? Or an intregal part of the story? How does it add levels or meaning to the story?