By Sophie Balhetchet

A few years ago, my brother found a small box and inside was a slotted rack holding a few Kodak colour transparencies: photographic images mounted between white cardboard intended for projection onto a screen. Just by holding them up to the light, memories of our childhood summers at our grandmother’s house in the South of France came flooding back.

These photographs were taken by our father. Some are edged with light spill, others are in deep shadow, of us at play and at rest. They reactivate memories and I recall, or think I recall, each moment as though it were yesterday.

Bathing in the green tub; me walking through the courtyard in my red skirt; white plimsolls drying; the clack of the palm fronds on shutters; seeking shade under the parasol; painting on the terrace. Our mother is often in the picture – serene, amused and tanned; our father is unseen; always behind the camera.

The feeling is of such nostalgia – endless days, heat, peace and the enveloping sense of parental love. This was to end of course just a few years later, with our father’s sudden death, and our world changed.

I’d been trying to capture the feeling of these photographs – in screen prints, in ink drawings … but it was always fugitive…until recently when I picked up some chalk pastels and found the medium through which I could convey the brightness, the precision and the dream haze of those times – captured forever in dad’s photographs.

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