A creative feature by Amy Colman.
With the exception of morticians, hospice nurses and ghost hunters, not many can say that their 9-5 job includes regular encounters with death. 21-year-old Tharsika Arulsothy has a job that is also an exception to this rule, yet not in the way many may expect. Whilst for the obvious few, death could be considered the butter to their monetary bread, it could be thought of as the seeds upon the crust for Photo Developers. Working in the Cornish seaside town of Falmouth, Arulsothy’s job puts her in the view finder of death and its many eccentricities on a regular basis. Aside from the shots of student parties, beach scenery and romantic escapades, there can be a darker side to her work.
The appropriately named Photo Shop in Falmouth garners plenty of regular customers in need of Arulsothy and her team to print images to commemorate lost loved ones. A dominant part of her job, she gets a secondhand peak through the lens of someone's life as she scans their images, and a front row seat to the memories which define these lives. The unassuming observer of thousands of people's best and worst moments, the job facilitates a voyeurism which can be both horrifying and wonderful.
As expected, the darker projects that are undertaken in her line of work can be emotionally challenging for herself and her team. Yet despite working on even the most moving of projects, she takes comfort in knowing how important these images may be to the customer- resigning herself to play her part for them to treasure memories captured. One such customer, a recently widowed elderly lady, had hoped that Tharsika would be able to transform a low-quality image of her late husband for it to be enlarged and printed as a tribute to him, after the customer shed a tear at the result, Arulsothy referred to the experience as “heartbreaking but worth it.”
Working on many different projects, she often gets the opportunity to bring life to old scans, having once worked with a customer who regularly brought in glass transparency images that he had purchased second hand. These images, found at a car boot sale, captured the travels of an anonymous individual in Southeast Asia and Europe. Some even showing the devastating aftermath of the 1908, Messina Earthquake in Southern Italy. She could not have known that morning that by the days end, she would have contributed to the re-telling of a historical disaster- one that could have died on the lips of the victims and their families.
Trusted with customers’ most intimate images, she has seen both the beginning and end of lives, undoubtedly altering the way she navigates her relationships and the time that she spends with her own loved ones. With a background in fashion photography at Falmouth University, Arulsothy has found that since working behind the scenes with the technical side of photography- her own practice has altered. Having veered away from curated photo collections with a distinct narrative, she now leans toward capturing life in a raw and honest way- following in her own father's footsteps using film photography as the chosen format. Images of day trips spent with friends, time with family and the smaller moments in between, these are the images that she wants to leave behind to commemorate her own life. With “six hundred images at least,” she wishes to leave behind a large photograph collection for family members to have the opportunity to see her life through her own lens.
For many, photography serves its purpose purely to capture memories for their own reflection upon later, yet as a photo developer she has been shown “the importance of images to a grieving family” who are able to view a lost life through that person’s own eyes. Leading to Arulsothy scouring her own family photograph collection, to print special memories, inspired by the hundreds of customers who do the same.
She recalls a photo collection brought in by a recently bereaved daughter. Taken by the ladies’ late father, the images were keen to relay his life story- one in which he was raised in Cornwall, moving away to a city university and obtaining a corporate job, only to return to the Southwest to raise his own children with his life partner. By watching this life through a brief series of images, Arulsothy became an unattached observer of a life well-lived, she may mentally form profiles of these individuals, witness them at their best and perhaps their worst, mourning them in the same way that their families do. Her job description possibly does not reflect the reality and duality of this- as both a great burden and blessing.
Whilst we all have hundreds -if not thousands - of photographs in our homes, whether beautifully framed or crumpled at the bottom of a box, it's all too often forgotten that every image has been seen by not only family and friends. Each image has seen the eyes of another, an invisible presence, not behind the camera but behind the ink itself, the one who passes the negatives through the machines, the one who packages them neatly prior to collection, an unassuming observer to our most cherished moments. As one of these unseen observers, Tharsika Arulsothy’s mark has been left on thousands of images, the uncredited technician that makes it possible for those memories to be placed upon the palm of your hand and held dear for decades to come.
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