Read: Hair, An Essay by Ruth Rosengarten

I am thirteen, and this is Johannesburg. Everyone praises my long, auburn hair. Titian, some call it, though it will will be several years before I learn that Titian is the name of a painter; that many voluptuous women in his paintings have rich red tresses. I love my hair, but it seems old fashioned: the wavy ponytail, the wayward fringe. It’s the 1960s.

I scour magazines when I can lay my hands on them: Cosmopolitan, Elle. With my pocket money, I have started buying Jackie, a magazine that gets flown in all the way from London, which already occupies a big place in my imagination. There are pull-out centrefolds of singers and bands I’ve never heard of. Longingly, I examine fashion models parading pixie cuts. I hanker for their doe-eyed, skinny loveliness, the edginess of their hairstyles, the crisp geometry of their short dresses. Especially, for the boys they surely attract.

You’d look beautiful with your hair like that, my mother says. You have such a pretty face. Such a pretty face. She says this many times, or so it seems to me. The pretty face, in its reiterations, stands in opposition to something else that I don’t have, and I think I know what that is. My mother makes sure I do, but indirectly, sneakily. It’s something to do with my body, which has to be reined in all the time, educated, made hungry. My mother is quite the hunger artist, but such thoughts are still unavailable to me. I am only vaguely aware that she is fighting her own battle around my body, a battle that expresses itself in the opposing imperatives: Eat! Don’t eat! I escape into books and I avoid sport at school. I have aching nipples popping out of breasts that already fit only tightly, and for the last time, into a B cup. My thighs are omelettes, joining together at the top, where I wish they were separate; my knees join too. 1 look, I think, awkward, childish. So I take up my mother’s suggestion of a haircut. I need to believe her: I need to trust that she knows something about short hair. That her urgings are not selfish, not personal; that she is neither moved by the daily drudgery of the school plait, nor driven by a darker, inchoate emotion.

I look at her hair made lustreless by straightening and hair spray, ruined by a longing to alter the curly course of nature. It’s a longing I shall inherit. The word “jealousy” is waiting to form itself, out in the future. When I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “Bernice Bobs her Hair” I recognise something that was not present in Jo March’s altruistic self-shearing in Little Women, a scene I always recollect with admiration and horror. In Fitzgerald’s story, the dramatic bobbing is a symptomatic acting out, the misguided conclusion drawn from a competitive web of youthful entanglements. Hair, I come to understand, can be currency in unspoken exchanges, unnamed rivalries.

But that comes later. At thirteen, I go along with the idea of the haircut despite the last-minute hesitation I see in the mirror, a green salon cape draped around my shoulders. Tears etch my cheeks. Are you sure? the hairdresser asks. Sure she’s sure, my mother says. It is then that I have an impulse that I now recognise as fully formed, characteristically my own. An archival impulse, I would call it now, using a phrase coined by art critic Hal Foster. Don’t cut it in bits, I say. Cut off the whole thing all at once.

Lop off the ponytail so I can keep it, is what I mean.

Even before it has been severed from my body, in thought, the ponytail has become a keepsake. And what is a keepsake if not a thought materialised?

Now the hair is wrapped in acid free tissue paper, like a treasured artifact or work of art. This hair may be as dead as a relic, but still it has a wild, weird electricity that reminds me of its connection to a living body. My body.

After the ponytail is chopped off, I feel light: inexplicably transformed, briefly free. But it does not take too long before I am bereft, unsexed. For forty years after that haircut grows out, I shall remain fetishistically bound to my head of long, burnished curls, the first descriptor I shall ever use when portraying myself to strangers; my pocket carnation, my intimate calling card. Eventually, menopause will teach me the wobbly pleasures of abandoning bodily ideals along with all the other attachments I need to shed; ageing will instruct me in the joys of ditching a fixed tag and gaining, in its place, changeable hair. And an ongoing relationship with a hairdresser.

But I am getting ahead of myself. What I want to think about now is the fragile parcel in crinkly tissue paper: a twisted, writhing rope, beribboned at either end, safeguarded for decades, through three emigrations and many more house moves.

Why?

What gets kept? What gets thrown away?

The distinction between relic and garbage is razor fine. There is so much I have discarded without a second thought. So many to-do and shopping lists that might have now served triggers or keys: clues to how, in the past, I envisioned a future. So many notes to self and notes to others have been snubbed by second thoughts. I am thinking of how enraptured I become when faced with works that touch on such ephemera. I am thinking especially of conceptual artist Keith Arnatt’s photographs of jottings and notes his wife Jo left him in the early 1990s (pies in microwave – press down thing that says ‘start’ to start; where are my wellingtons, you stupid fart?), thinking of the poignant testimony they served, after she died of a brain tumour in 1996: evidence of love and of the singularity of life à deux, made and remade in daily rituals of companionship and care.

I recognise in my early impulse to preserve the severed ponytail, a fascination I have always nurtured with remnants and traces. Testimony of a vitality that once was. In my studio, I have often drawn scuffed and battered shoes, gloves that bear the imprint of hands, bendy hats doffed. Outside I photograph food leftovers on a picnic blanket, roadkill, footprints in muddy soil, the impress of paws on beaches. I have many times photographed sheets that have been slept in. With my iPhone, I snap a mascara-impregnated tissue, a forsaken hair-clip, a dust-snarled broom. Tracks, evidence. These images of things that are only just, are the past tense made concrete. Signs of that which eventually gets erased, they are always the bearers of a muted grief.

If I’d been a mother, like artist Mary Kelly I’d have made an archive of my child’s nail parings, the fine curls of the first haircut, remainders of milk and poo and vomit, precious scribbles. Without children, it’s my own body – my own life – that has become the source of such longing and loss, preservation and release. I am consumed by the wish to document the material leftovers of my trajectories, to chronicle this life through its traces. My need to preserve an archive of the ephemeral has adhered stubbornly to objects that have, in turn, become the transmitters of that very need. Objects to which I have become immoderately attached.

I am, of course, not unique in this. We all keep some things, discard others. We do this all the time. While internet shopping has seduced us with apparently seamless, obstacle-free access to stuff, further abstracting our notion of money, we are also constantly assailed by an opposing solicitation: declutter. Sometimes, decluttering is more than a fashionable dialectic with excess: it is an imperative of transience. In an essay “Goodbye to all that,” a clever riff on Joan Didion’s eponymous essay, essayist Eula Biss reviews her four moves while living in New York. “Each time I owned less,” she writes. “I left New York without even a bed. I no longer had potted plants, or framed pieces of art, or a snapshot of my father. I remember the moment when I threw that snapshot out. I was sifting through my things before another hurried move with a borrowed car, and I looked at the photo, thinking I don’t really need this – he still looks almost the same.”

In extremis, however, the objects that we keep – and especially photographs – remind us of how we come to be who we are, of life as we once lived it. Of those we love and miss.

For his project Home and Away, Malaysian based photographer Adi Safri spent time with asylum seekers crossing the border into Malaysia. Safri created photographic portraits of some of these refugees, each framed separately, facing the camera directly. There is no artiness here: these images are unapologetically witness statements. Each person is captured holding a possession she or he could not bear to leave behind. These include a school bag, a stuffed toy (gift from a lost father), the dress of a small daughter who had to be left behind, a pair of flip flops used at the time of escape, a traditional Somali shawl, a slingshot given to a boy by a childhood friend, and also an engagement photograph. I look at these images repeatedly and each time, a feeling of the safety and guilty excess in which I live encroaches upon me. I know they are important images, since they signal the transition from bare life to a life of connectedness, of social immersion and meaning.

For a long time, I have been interested in such autobiographically charged objects: not so much heirlooms as things skimmed off the surface of everyday life. Things that furnish our day-to-day existence and that, in their acquaintance with the humdrum, act beneath the visible as spurs to memory, cues to thought. We may regard these as trophies or tokens: always, they are private memorials.

But such objects can also, over time, wear thin as mnemonic prompts, becoming ossified, dusty curios. With a pinch of courage or nonchalance, we might find ourselves taking them to a charity shop, or binning them. And then later, we may come to regret such disburdening. Nevertheless, objects – like facts – can intrude into the more fluid, ambiguous space of memory. There is something terrible, essayist Brian Dillon reflects in his collection of autobiographic fragments In the Dark Room, “about the way a dumb artifact can lead us back to the past, if only because its very existence is at odds with the passing of the bodies to which it might once have attached itself, or with which it once shared the space of daily life.” Objects might remind us of our old selves or of other people, but that very association can land up fossilizing the living, changeable beings we once were, and those others whom we miss.

We attach ourselves to objects because of their perceived stability: this ponytail, this handkerchief, this sled with the word Rosebud inscribed upon it. The very thingness of our evocative objects, their staunch assertion of presence, confers the fantasy of stability on the subject, on me.

But with our fervent attachment to meaningful objects, we sometimes forget that the relationship between humans and the object world in which they are immersed is never firmly fixed. We know the natural world is in flux, but a visit to any museum will remind us that the artefactual world is not stable either. Time not only corrodes and reshapes objects, it also affects our association with them. Even our relationship to deeply cherished mementos can suffer the whips and scorns of time. Objects, in other words – even ones that are not charged with the burden of carrying our personal histories – have contours that are more porous than we might imagine; their quiddity is not always assured. And so, the self finds and defines, and then re-finds and re-defines itself in the process of assigning shifting mental and emotional places to and for such things. Loved, unloved, loved again perhaps.

But as I edge towards my dotage, I find myself overcome by the desire to disencumber myself of the dead weight of certain objects and their meanings, their link to grief, to loss. In Orson Welles’ classic Citizen Kane, amidst prodigious collections of useless things, the memento enjoys a certain tyranny, yet sometimes, its nested allusions point simply to other mementos. I now find myself longing to achieve a whittling down, an existential minimalism. To rely more confidently on the workings of memory, the flow and ebb of recollection, perhaps even allowing what gets lost to remain lost. Making the job easier for those who will one day have to clean up after me. Or rather: I long for such release, and equally I don’t. Because to long for it is to acknowledge ending. My ending.

Writing shares with photography the semblance of defying death, or at the least of deferring it. It is a clean, space-saving way of laying claim to things, keeping them again. Like memory itself, writing gives us a second chance: an opportunity to reassemble fractured pieces of the past into the narrative shapes on which memory insists. Thinking these things, moving them, re-inventing them gives us a freedom that may be forgone when we doggedly hold onto the things themselves. And so, I need to know that I have a record of those objects that, in different ways, serve as indices of my history, my trajectory. Those things that – small, intertwined, interconnected – “conspired to tell me the whole story,” as Pablo Neruda puts it in his Ode to Common Things.

That’s but one step away from telling my stories through the miscellany of the non-functional, this bounty of useless, haunting objects that are mine for a while. As I write “telling my stories,” I think: no. No, it is not that. This exercise, I feel, must surely throw light on connections that I have not previously made. On aspects that have remained in hiding; that have slipped through the scaffolding of the stories that I have frequently, perhaps unthinkingly, told others, told myself.

The objects that unleash my trains of association and unfurling narratives are as idiosyncratic as anyone’s private relics. I find that in order to write about them – in order to experience them in a mediated, communicable way – I need to photograph them first, as if to fix and contain them, to frame them. I am particular in how I do this. I want the ground on which the object is positioned to be neutral, white; I want the light to be so[ and even. No horizon line. Despite the pernickety care I take in framing and lighting, I don’t want these images to be too arty. Nevertheless, their quality as images is not immaterial to me either: they are not snapshots. And I cannot begin the process of mnemonic unwinding and rewinding, of un-forgeting and association, without first positioning the image at the top of a blank document. Scaling and centring it; containing it in a fine outline to separate it from the luminous page which is not a page.

Then, the invention of memory can begin.

For more information on Ruth’s work go to www.ruthrosengarten.com