William Viney - Twins: Superstitions and Marvels, Fantasies and Experiments

M y mothers photographs catalogue life on an English farm in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. The photos make it easy to imagine the low drone of the milking parlour, the smell of slurry and wet Labrador. All the sounds and smells that made our working and domestic lives blur as one. My mothers pictures also capture the affection she reserved for her children and for the dogs that made our home a happy chaos. But these are not the reasons my friends now want to dive into these treasured books. Each album, red and square, is fetched from the shelves and a familiar ceremony begins. I watch as my friends, with the albums on their knees, become gripped by a desire to see me at my smallest. Theres something unnervingly rapid to their curiosity as they rifle through the plastic pages like a gambler nosing through a bookies form book. Ignored are the pictures of family members with garish clothes and large hair, along with the itinerant eccentrics who would come to the farm for temporary shelter and leave years later. Instead, my friends seek a special kind of visual treasure that is discovered as we reach the first pages dedicated to 1984.

They hesitate at the sight of my mother, who has appeared from behind the camera. In one picture she stands in the old farmhouse, the serene evening light falling across a maternity dress so big it could double as a parachute. Another page is turned, and here we are, fresh from the mint. Across the next pages we grow older and enlarge, become toddlers and the children of a fluorescent decade. Here are the twins my friends have come to see. And then a multiple game of spot-the-difference happens at such a frenzied pace that it can be hard to know who are the games eventual winners. We are a visual tease, my brother and I, and involuntary objects in a simple game familiar to other twins. Can you identify which one is which? In the discussions that follow, our bodies are broken into manageable parts and our little noses and eyes, lips and ears get scrutinized a smile between mirth and conspiracy is judged unique to one, held in common by both, or declared an outlier in need of further analysis. Why didnt your mother dress you in the same clothes? Is it me, or does he have a rounder face? How did you make each other laugh so much? If I can answer their questions it is because I have practised seeing the differences and have been schooled in a relationship that is both something I was born into and something that has grown and been refashioned over time, and which is still being moulded through a bewildering and occasionally painful process of public display and consultation. I am struck by how I myself cannot always tell twin from twin. Though I can look at a picture that contains the faces of two little boys, I cannot always be sure which of those faces is mine. It is a small glimpse of myself as others would have seen me in the 1980s and early 1990s, as a person put in doubt: So then, which one are you? It is a game that spreads across the leather-bound albums, extends beyond their pages to the here and now. Perhaps the winners are simply those who can trace in the photographed folds of flesh a telling dimple or blemish, a giveaway sign that identifies me from him. One way or another, my development is mapped. But not just mine. No, not just me; always also him. That oblique sense of we this duo, this couple, the twins we are.