Since the age of 16, my room has scarcely ever been without a vase of flowers. It began when I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Throughout my treatment – even when I was in an isolation ward and not allowed them – people would send me beautiful bouquets. Their vivid colours and sweet scents cheered up the room, but, as they began to fade, the omen of impending death became too prescient and they had to be replaced by fresh specimens, full of life and renewed hope. And so the cycle goes on. 20 years later. I survived. The flowers die, but new ones take their place and accompany me on my journey.
For Sue Miles, flowers also played a significant role in her cancer journey. Unfortunately, unlike me, she did not survive. Her stage 4 lung cancer had already spread throughout her body by the time of diagnosis. But her daughter, documentary photographer Celine Marchbank, made it her project – their shared project, in fact – to capture on camera the last years of Sue’s life. An edited compilation has now been published by Dewi Lewis Publishing as the beautiful visual memoir, Tulip.
“This was obviously a very painful time for me, but I always felt it was important to record it in some way,” writes Marchbank in the foreword. “I’m a documentary photographer after all and so, more than ever, I felt the need to record everything, like some kind of magpie collecting thoughts and moments rather than shiny things.”
The photographs are not mawkish or maudlin. Poignant and lachrymose, yes, but they will also make you smile. Obviously many of the objects immortalised – stripy socks, jars of apricot jam, a handwritten list of holiday destinations – have private meaning for Marchbank, but we can all extrapolate from these and paint our own portraits of someone we love, someone closer to us than anyone else, and recollect those tiny things that wash over us on a daily basis, without our paying attention, but which, were that person to be gone, we would soon not be able to fully remember. Things that would – and one day will – be lost forever. For Marchbank, who uses her camera like a writer might her pen, every minute and intimate detail has been stored, kept for eternity, a powerful testament to someone much loved.
There are portraits of her mother interspersed – annotated here and there with a comment or memory – but this book is not a portrait of illness or death. In context, each image becomes a vanitas, but this is not an elegy. “This project became not just about her, but about her home, her life, my place in it, and of course, her beloved cats.” And it is memories of all these secondary things, which define a person, keep a person alive, far more than a posed holiday snapshot. It is these things, which, like Proust’s madeleine, evoke the smells, the sounds and the tastes of a time gone by and a person lost.
Sadly, for Sue and Celine, the flowers fade. As the book progresses, they wither and die. Peonies, hydrangeas, freesias, cornflowers – and tulips: “my mother’s favourite flower”. This is a beautiful and heart-rending book; a personal and private album, but, unable to share the finished project with her mother, Marchbank has chosen to share with us. I, for one, feel honoured.
– reviewed by Anna McNay
© Celine Marchbank
© Celine Marchbank
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Tulip by Celine Marchbank was published by Dewi Lewis Publishing. For further viewing: www.celinemarchbank.com/tulip
