I found solace in looking through my father’s slides after he died. They made me gasp – and my childhood turned from monotonous monochrome to glorious Technicolor
W
hen my sister handed me a box of old Kodachrome slides last summer, I almost didn’t bother looking through them. Unusually for pre-smartphone times, my camera-crazy father had extensively documented our lives, filling dozens of photo albums. What could the transparencies possibly reveal that we hadn’t already seen countless times? I dimly remembered him ambushing us to watch slideshows, until we were old enough to rebel.
My father died in 2012. Not long before, I had developed an interest in photography myself and, after he was gone, I found solace in my viewfinder. It was, and still is, a way of feeling connected to him. What prompted me to set up my iPad as a makeshift lightbox to view the slides was technical interest.
One of the first images out of the box was of my mother and me on the tarmac at Heathrow airport. We are about to board an Air India plane to Kolkata. We had lots of photos from that holiday, all of them black and white prints, conventional snaps, but I had never seen this epic photo before.
