Looking at snapshots of the past

Old family photographs and a mother’s anecdote sends JEANA VITHOULKAS off on a journey of exploration of representations of the past.


Of all the photographs taken of our parents in Greece before they came to Australia, it was the one we never saw that haunted us the most.

The photographs with the movie star poses were my favourites. My uncle Dionysi in a trench coat, cigarette in hand, face turned slightly to the left, gazing into the middle distance – a look meant to look mysterious, serious and with a hint of darkness.

Growing up, the small, black and white representations of my parents’ generation were evidence of our elders’ lives before us.

Before Australia, before families, before factories, before mortgages, before an existence their imaginations could never have taken them to.

Among them were the photographs of the aunts and uncles who didn’t come. There they were, frozen in 1959 black and white, their Jane Russell hair style, their pointy ended sunglasses, their cream jackets worn with the same throw back style as Marcello Mastroianni, leaning on a vespa – the only vespa in the village.

One wonders how many times was that cream jacket borrowed?

The photographs with the movie star poses were my favourites.

My uncle Dionysi in a trench coat, cigarette in hand, face turned slightly to the left, gazing into the middle distance – a look meant to look mysterious, serious and with a hint of darkness. He was pure Alain Delon, Le Samourai, for the day.

This was the most unreal one for me because in real life, he owned a delicatessen, spent all day in an apron, was balding with a pronounced paunch and had an annoying tic of stretching his neck out to the left as if pulling away from a tight shirt collar.

But in that photo he is somebody else and yet it was this photo sent to Olga in Sydney which seduced her into accepting his proposal of marriage that enabled him to come to Australia.

When she looked at that photo, did she see what I saw and how long did she take getting over Alain Delon to living with Dionysi?

The photo that we never saw, the one that haunted us, was of my mother. As legend has it, she walked into a studio in Alexandrou Roma Street in Zakynthos in 1959 and had posed for a passport shot. The result was so stunning that Vasilis Dafnos, the photographer, blew it up and put it in his display window.

“I wish I had the money to buy it,” she would sigh. “But we were so poor, I could hardly afford shoes, let alone a blown up portrait of myself.”

“Couldn’t somebody else buy it for you?” we asked.

“Who?” she would laugh. “Everyone was poor, like us.”

But we hankered after the Hollywood fairytale. Some rich kindly man should have appeared from somewhere, someone with money, for whom class didn’t matter.

He would have seen the photo, been taken by her beauty, not minded that she was dirt poor with no dowry, asked who she was, pursued her and bought the photo for her.

Then of course, he would have married her.

Our parents may have posed like Hollywood stars, but the plot of their narratives were not so simple. Is anyone’s?

She had lost her passport years before so it was up to our imaginations to conjure up the picture that graced a shop window in Zakynthos for a whole year, by a business man advertising his skill.

‘Come to me,’ he was saying by placing it there. ‘And I can make you look beautiful like this.’

In the era of mass migration with marriages arranged with people they’d never seen on the other side of the world, everyone was keen to make that best, first impression.

That one photo was make or break. Dafnos knew his market.

In the winter of 1992, on a rainy night in Zakynthos my sister and I stumbled across Dafnos’ photograph shop. It had actually been in the same spot since 1959 and on previous trips we may have seen it, bought film there, but hadn’t made the connection.

We were standing across the road from it when my sister grabbed my arm and said, “Look, that’s Dafnos’ shop.” She was pointing to the sign above the door.

“Who’s Dafnos,” I asked.

“The guy who took Mum’s photo. That she couldn’t afford to buy.”

We marched straight into the marbled floor shop with fittings that hadn’t been renovated in forty years. A bewigged man in his seventies looked up from his newspaper. In a rush of words, we explained ourselves. We assumed he would know what we were talking about straight away.

“Girls,” he chuckled. “I’ve had so many women in my shop window. How am I supposed to remember who was there in 1959?

“But I’ve kept photos from that time, downstairs in boxes. I could have a look, but…”

We returned the next day with a photo of our mother as a bride in Australia that we found in our aunt’s photo album in the village.

“That’s her,” we said. “This was taken a year after she left here.”

He studied it with interest, drawing on his cigarette, his ducktail wig placed slightly more forward on his head than our last visit. On the wall, I noticed a photo of him taken in his youth, a full head of Elvis Presley hair.

“Come back in a week,” he ordered.

“We’ll pay your for your efforts,” we declared and he grunted.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

We returned the following week, excited by the prospect of seeing our mother’s face when we handed her the photo.

Dafnos was expecting us. A box was produced from the draw at his desk and he pulled the photos out one by one. We saw an array of women with chubby faces, moles in the wrong places, a hint of a moustache, with short Jean Seberg haircuts.

None of them were our mother.

“No, no, no! She had long hair, just like her wedding photo. She was not fat.”

“Fat? They’re not fat, they’re normal, not like you skin and bone types today. At least we had something to grab onto,” he smiled.

“Fine,” my sister snapped, clearly not in the mood to hear his sexual reminisces. “But none of these women are our mother.”

He pulled one out from the pack.

“Look,” he said, pointing to it and putting our mother’s wedding photo along side it. “That’s her. They have exactly the same eyebrows. Look at those eyebrows.”

We took a good look at those eyebrows. Fine eyebrows indeed, but they were not our mother’s.

Our heads bent closely together, studying this stranger, stewing in our disappointment that we would never have the moment of handing our mother that long desired artefact of her youth and beauty, we suddenly locked eyes and burst out laughing.

“Get yourself some glasses and forget about the wig,” my sister advised him and pointed to his younger self on the wall. “It looks just as much as the real thing as these women look like our mother.”