Notes on Reading, Laura Cumming - "On Chapel Sands"

  Close reading family memoir - death and the photograph


In this blog series, I want to share a few writings from my time at university. For the module, Telling Lives, we read selected family memoirs and wrote short blogs on our interpretations. Each piece was written along a certain theme, with the aim of highlighting a unique viewing lens for the text.


On Chapel Sands explores the relationship between death and photography. In this extract I close read a photograph of the speaker's grandmother, Veda, taken by her grandfather, George. The physical image has outlived the both of them and will outlive the speaker.



Laura Cumming, On Chapel Sands (London: Vintage, 2020):


    On Chapel Sands presents the immortality of the photograph. Cumming describes a photograph of Veda (p. 114), in which George and Veda are ‘both there together, united, breathing the same warm air’ (p. 114). These two, now dead, are impossibly alive and ‘breathing’ in the present tense. Thus, the photograph offers a resistance of time. Simultaneously, it reminds us of our own fate. The viewer is made aware of their mortality and how their undead image may outlive them. Cumming takes almost four pages to describe this photograph. This focus has a nostalgic tone; nostalgia for a past she was not in and a nostalgia for her own death.

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