Mary Ford Neal

PHOTOGRAPH

The interview reel is old, and the film of poor quality. The man being interviewed is seventy, or thereabouts. It is obvious to him now, he says, that what he shot was a child. “Yes,” he says, “of course it was!” He says this angrily, as though he had been deceived. The screen fills with a grainy photograph of a young boy in a smart suit, sitting alongside a slightly older girl who wears large white ribbons in her carefully braided hair. The boy looks around three years old. The film cuts back to the elderly man, who has been given the original photograph to hold. He is staring at it with incomprehension. “Of course, I can see now that they are children,” he repeats, “but it did not seem like that at the time. I cannot explain it to you.” He narrates in a clear and factual way, in a voice that does not falter, the story of how he shot this boy for a reason he cannot remember and kicked his body into a pit. He holds the photograph at arm’s length, as though it might come into better focus, allowing him to glimpse whatever it was that he saw forty years earlier, instead of a little boy. He tilts it back and forth, like we used to do with those plastic lenticular rulers that showed rainbows at one angle and dinosaurs at another. But all he sees now is a child.

Mary Ford Neal is a writer and academic based near Glasgow. She is the author of two poetry collections: Relativism (Taproot, 2022) and Dawning (Indigo Dreams, 2021). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in print and online journals including The North, The London Magazine, Bad Lilies, The Interpreter's House, And Other Poems, One Hand Clapping, Honest Ulsterman, Berlin Lit, Anthropocene, and many more. Her work has been commissioned for the BBC and has received several Pushcart and BOTN nominations.

Mary wrote the following about her poem:

I was inspired to write ‘Photograph’ while watching an old history documentary programme from the 1970s or 1980s. It caused me to reflect on how capable human beings are of convincing ourselves that things are other than what they are, and in particular, of dehumanising one another. We put this faculty to use not only in perpetrating large-scale acts of undeniable atrocity like the one hinted at in the poem, but in causing myriad smaller harms to one another every day. The poem explores this amazing capacity to believe exactly what suits us, and its tragic and destructive potential.