Opinion: What's in a photograph?

Keith Street School, 1920.

I have a photograph of Keith Street School. In the foreground there is an assembly of people – teaching staff, parents and, foremost amongst them, the school's pupils.

The photo is more than 100 years old and the school building in the picture has been demolished. It's a near certainty that all the people depicted are now gone.

It's kind of touching that a few of the boys are wearing school ties and, save for one girl who seems to be lost in her own thoughts, every other participant has a singular focus on the camera, caught in a moment of time in 1920.

The children's faces form a collective gaze which begs me to contemplate that which is beyond my imagination – the circumstances of their lives.

Survivors of the Spanish flu, some probably were fatherless because of World War I and others may yet become victims of World War II. The Depression of the 1930s would have impacted their lives. Most were the adults of my childhood. Their youthful expressions give no indication of apprehension of what the future might hold.

The photograph will probably mean nothing to the average observer. It is after all just another photo taken once upon a time on a sunny afternoon in Whanganui just after the First World War.

My simple hope, however, is that someone might recognise a relative in the photograph; and that others will look with appreciation at the faces of those whose collective existence means more, in my opinion, than any of the city's glorified historical luminaries.

It is not without reason that I have such a hope. Washed of all sin and sanctified by the god/dess of woke, a person with whom I have the misfortune to occasionally be acquainted, described the generation to which the photograph's subjects belonged as racist and sexist.

I suppose there is always some truth in a lie but at some stage of their lives the children in the photograph helped form the meld of Whanganui history; and by their diverse talents, contributed to Whanganui's future – and my own.

In the first few rows I recognise my mother. She never knew her father, he did not return from World War I.

Her mother's only means of financial support was from the money she earned as a nighttime office cleaner and a daytime domestic – and therein lies a story; a story amongst the many that are implicit in the photograph – a collection of stories, never told.

Pity it is that the families represented in the photograph can be so easily damned by the casual expression of my erstwhile associate.

Each Anzac Day, lest we forget, we memorialise the sacrifice of those who served in various conflicts around the world. Should it also be that we remember without ceremony, but with respect, the collective contribution upon which much of our current comforts are predicated?