I will never know what that picture represented. He balked when I asked him, which meant there was something in that picture that he would rather have kept secret. But I'll never know.
“When he left his homeland never to return,” as you say. Maybe your father kept the picture simply because it expresses his attachment to his native place, and the bars represent the impossibility of return to that place and its snows. In which case, his statement, “it belongs to the past” was not evasive but simply true.
I will never know what that picture represented. He balked when I asked him, which meant there was something in that picture that he would rather have kept secret. But I'll never know.
No problem at all. But I am flattered that you made the connection.
“When he left his homeland never to return,” as you say. Maybe your father kept the picture simply because it expresses his attachment to his native place, and the bars represent the impossibility of return to that place and its snows. In which case, his statement, “it belongs to the past” was not evasive but simply true.
The picture was not taken in Alexandria! But a good guess.
André
Yes I realized that too late. I am remembering from Out of Egypt your father was from Turkey?
I love what you wrote about my piece.It's not everyday that I feel that someone has really understood me. Thank you ever so much.
There’s something profoundly Aciman in the way this photograph refuses to give up its core.
A life that left no secrets in speech somehow hides entire worlds in silence.
What moved me most is how the picture becomes a kind of test:
Not of memory, but of how we look.
Your reading turns the image into a mirror.
A barred window.
A single figure in the snow.
A father on the cusp of departure.
All of it flickering between what happened and what might have happened, between the literal and the irrealis (new favorite word)
The author understands that photographs don’t document—they haunt.
They hold the shape of a life at the exact moment it becomes unreachable.
And there’s a tenderness in his refusal to pin the image down.
To insist on possibility over explanation.
To let longing do the work that certainty can’t.
What is a photograph, if not a small trapdoor into the unknowable?
A place where absence keeps behaving like presence?
This piece captures that beautifully.
Haunting image and story. We imagine the past through it
thnx Andre