The Ornithologist
Jane Coutts, the author of The Books and the Sea:
I once had the privilege of digitising a disparate collection of glass negatives for a museum. They had come from a variety of sources, and invariably found their way to the museum after someone died, or from a donated collection, or sometimes they turned up in an old house and no-one knew anything about them, or who the people in the images were. Those were the ones I remember best, the ones we knew nothing about, because they began to tell a tale which could lead to all kinds of places.
Perhaps it was because I spent long hours working in isolation, but each time an image appeared on the screen, it was as if a whole world of strange tales lurked somewhere behind it, and not for one moment did the work become mechanical or tedious. Images of familiar faces lit up the screen alongside completely unknown ones, and for the duration, I was able to visit someone else’s world, a dimension of people and places which had been absent for a little while.
I spent many a winter afternoon conversing with these ghosts. On occasion, the images were so faded that nothing was apparently left to see until they were scanned onto the screen. Out of the nothing, something distorted was lurking in the background, and from this faint image, I was able to bring back a clearer picture and see something which had, to all intents and purposes, died.
Some of the slides had been taken on important occasions, ones which no-one could remember any more, and some had been taken in formal moments after people had rushed into the house to change their workclothes, as though they knew someone would revisit the moment in years to come, as I was doing then. Some of the slides were taken at sea and some on land, some in houses and some in fields, and some were taken when no-one was looking.
The stories the images told me, and the tales they sometimes tried to tell and only half finished, are how most of this book was born, especially The Ornithologist. It is loosely based on a man who, himself, talked with ghosts, and they helped him to take pictures of birds when no-one else thought – or dared – to.