Life through a lens – the importance of keeping a record of our past

The Real Mackay by Dan Mackay

Faye Schulman was a happy teenager, learning to be a photographer, when the Nazis invaded her small hometown on the Russian-Polish border.

Lenin, where she grew up, was eradicated in August 1942 and nearly 2000 people, including her parents and six siblings, were all murdered.

The Nazis recognised Schulman’s photography skills and forced her to document images of their military engagements, including massacres and other atrocities. All of which she personally witnessed. Secretly she kept extra copies of her work.

Somehow Faye escaped to become a partisan in the Molotova Brigade, where she had just one thing in mind – to avenge the murder of her family.

Remarkably she survived the war and lived to the grand old age of 101. She wrote a memoir of her wartime experiences, describing the many raids she took part in. Along the way she had taken care of an eight-year-old girl, Raika, after the wife of a priest who had been looking after her fled. Raika was taken to Moscow when the war ended but Schulman never saw or heard of her again.

Schulman was undoubtedly affected, perhaps even scarred, by her experiences. How could it be otherwise? She died in April this year.

But her photographic images survive and are their own graphic testimonies to both the brave resistance fighters and the many innocent victims of the Nazi horrors.

The Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero once wrote: "To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"

Here I would like to mention the work of local photographers who, I believe, have contributed and woven into to our own records the images of the life events in our community that tell our story.

And not least among them my own sister Eswyl Fell.

Eswyl, who has always had a passion for art, came to photography following the birth of her son Jonathan more than 21 years ago. And since then her camera and an assortment of lenses have become almost permanent appendages! Eswyl never goes anywhere without her camera. And she says she is still looking for that elusive photograph – the one – “which I still haven’t found”.

She follows in a grand tradition of photographers, most notably the three generations of the Johnston family, who captured Wick’s unfolding story during the fabulous days of the herring industry.

They were followed by others including Herbert Sinclair whose photographic compendium Over The Ord is a much valued Caithness memento.

We had the professionals, of course, Robert MacDonald’s Northern Studios, and the McDonald family of Shore Lane, to name just a few, have all played their part in cataloguing scenic descriptions – landscapes and portraiture – of life in a northern town.

The advent of digital photography and social media platforms has enabled many others to make their own contributions.

On Facebook, throughout the pandemic, Derek Bremner posted daily photos of his walks around town charting both Wick and the wider county in all seasons and kept us up to date with life beyond the restricted confines of our lockdown isolation. It was a real tonic.

Eswyl has been the passionate and ever present photographer during town galas, armistice parades, senior citizen treats, the big social events in the Assembly Rooms, local weddings… you name it. She offers her services freely but may suggest a charity worthy of support.

Like Schulman before them, our photographers remind us that what is recorded and remembered lives.

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