Emma

Portrait of our daughter Emma, shortly after her 11th birthday.
Still a little girl, but not for very long, I guess.

Here is an apt poem by Lars Gustafsson (which I translated to English from a Dutch translation):

Martin Kober painted in 1596
Prince Ladislav of Poland, then one year old.
He is clothed in a costume of shiny grey
suede or brocade, ducal insigna
hang heavily from his neck, his left arm
makes a gesture, distracted and proud at once
as if about to invite to a sarabande or an other slow dance.
Wisely and clearly his old man’s eyes watch
us. They already contain his whole life.
Children on a group photo in front of Norreland sawing mills,
anno 1890, have similar eyes, serious,
but altogether less proud, but also they harbour everything.
These portraits, I mean, express much better
what man is than these photos,
at once from a distance and flattering
as became the custom when kids,
these little animals with tin soldiers and dolls,
marched into the perspective of the nineteenth century.
Not people. But not really something from
the zoo either. Rather something in between,
a kind of imitation of people
with coquettish gestures, as kittens,
with little drums, trumpets, rifles,
the midgets of the industrial bad conscience
that halfway the century clambered out of
childrens’ rooms.
Whilst the real children
- with other gestures – crawl ever deeper
in the dusty blindness of the British coal layers.
One learns them their own language,
with palatal consonants, so that they would believe
to be unique. Thus they are denied an insight
that could prove to be fatal.
There are days that I am looking for myself
chasing God knows what, across the years,
from the forties through the thirties.
I see myself, in short trousers,
sitting hours on end at the side of a lake.
Wavelets splash over small round stones.
A school of whitefish swims in at low tide.
From a distance of three decades I approach
the boy who is sitting there, quietly, quietly,
so that he will not notice who is standing there.
I want to see what he sees. When my shadow
falls over the water, the whitefish shoot off.
The boy is still there. His eyes are reflected in the water.
They are like the eyes of Ladislav, big, serious,
grown up: in the child there is no child.

Lars Gustaffson, 1980

Still same roll of Neopan 1600, Leica CM. Negative has been cropped, obviously.