Unearthing Family History Amid the Racism of British Social Services
Conceived both as a book and as a collection of photographs, texts, and objects, Hard To Place traces the journey of Joseph, a mixed-race foster child growing up in London in the 1960s and 1970s.
Hard To Place is Qiana Mestrich’s first body of work focused on someone else’s life, and it is the first time she’s taken a man’s history as a subject. In adulthood, Joseph and Qiana married, so as her husband, this man’s history is intricately bound up with her own. Hard To Place is an important continuation of Mestrich’s explorations of family and ancestry.
Born to a married Nigerian father and a single Irish woman who was deemed mentally unstable, Joseph, like many other mixed-race children, was categorized as a “half-caste” and described as “hard to place.”
Mestrich learned of this in 2013, when Joseph received photocopied documents from the London Borough of Camden that chronicled his itinerant childhood years. Before receiving these files, Joseph’s story included large gaps — the absence of a family, for one, but also the lack of a personal history during the years that he was “in care.” The gaps and seeming fungible truths resonated with Mestrich, as she too, had experienced a complicated family situation, identifying as mixed-race and having been raised by a single mother who immigrated to a big city. She had read about, and become interested in similar cases in 1960s and ’70s London even before Joseph received the files.
“Back then, many young, unwed women were forced to give birth in convents and give their mixed-race babies up for adoption,” she says. “Just the act of exiling women to give birth in secret is evidence enough of this denial and erasure.”
The body of work that’s resulted from discovering Joseph’s tucked-away childhood story loosely emulates the form of a file or archive: Hard To Place includes vintage photographs of Joseph’s parents and of him as a child, new photographs taken by Mestrich of their son, as well as fragments of the official documents from the Camden files, and single words extricated from their context. The loose elements string together a new narrative, one of a history reclaimed, at least partially, and of care and family unity paid forward to the couple’s son.
Hard To Place records a history heretofore untold, allows for a contextualization of the documents and their vocabulary, while also serving as a family album of sorts. Important to Mestrich is also recognizing the “huge void of books by photographers of color in the photobook world. For me it’s important to publish my work as a way of sharing and archiving it,” she says.
The different visual elements in Hard To Place convey that it is a difficult and deeply personal story to tell and understand, one that will inevitably have some gaps. The vintage photographs return humanity to Joseph’s parents, particularly to his mother, Maureen, who was described in the documents as having an “unstable Irish temperament,” and being “not very intelligent.” In one picture, she is lying on a bed next to a bright, curtained window, her face relaxed in a seeming state of bliss, revealing youthful elation and innocence.
Another photo shows Maureen standing on a busy street corner, her eyes closed, with one hand loosely holding a white stroller, Joseph sleeping soundly inside. The hat-clad shadow of the man taking the picture is a poignant reminder of the absence of a father figure in Joseph’s early life, while Maureen’s expression — her closed eyes, her forlorn look, her one loose hand — can read as if she’s already partially let go.
The coldness of the language in the legal documents is tempered by the humanity of the photographs, and this is nowhere as true as in Mestrich’s own photographs of her son which establish her voice as an image-maker and mother, and propose a different narrative for the “half-caste” boy of the text.
“We have many photos of Joe as a child but for me it was important to visualize a mixed-race body without any personal identity, which is why you don’t ever see my son’s face,” she says.
In the exhibition, the documents and photographs are complemented by some of Joseph’s mother’s personal objects, further coloring her as a character, and countering “the dominant, fictitious narrative(s) of the orphan child as someone who comes from nothing and no one.”
With Hard To Place, Mestrich has peeled back the layers of Joseph’s early history, opening up the ways we can read and understand a person’s trajectory and forcing a sharp look at the outcome of xenophobia and racism. This particular narrative might be set in London yet it stands in for countless other stories in other cities that remain untold. But Mestrich is careful to avoid a sentimental eye.
“Nostalgia and photography are inextricably linked,” she recognizes, “but to me this work is not sentimental because it is not dishonest and does not try to romanticize what happened.”
Despite the stark reality it showcases, Mestrich is convinced that with Hard To Place “there are other emotions that the viewer can experience … like humor, bliss, happiness, and uncertainty.”
Mestrich prompts questions about the inseparable links between race, ancestry, and culture and, crucially, she adds new layers to Joseph’s story that contradict the notion that denied histories are self-perpetuating. Mestrich makes a case for taking control of one’s own story.
This essay was written by Paula Kupfer on the occasion of the Hard To Place exhibition and book launch at Booklyn, New York city (February 5th — March 15, 2016).
Hard To Place is available for purchase online at Booklyn shop.
Paula Kupfer is a writer and editor based in New York. She works as photo editor for The California Sunday Magazine, and was previously the managing editor of Aperture magazine.
Qiana Mestrich is a photographer and writer from Brooklyn, NY. She is the founder of Dodge & Burn: Diversity in Photography History, a blog which profiles photographers of color. Mestrich is also co-editor of the book How We Do Both: Art and Motherhood (Secretary Press). During the day, Mestrich works as the Associate Director, Digital Content and Engagement at the International Center of Photography (ICP).
