Orphaned at the early age of eight, my Latvian grandmother Mirdza Kaupiņa was then brought up by an aunt. Nothing is known of those years and there are no photographs to document her passage from child to young woman. This hardly seems credible to our image saturated generation where each new childhood experience and development is recorded and shared. All that remains to be seen of my grandmother’s early life is a handful of photographs dating from the early 1920s until the 1940s. At some point in the 1920s she followed in her parent’s footsteps and joined the theatre in Liepaja. These are the earliest pictures of her performing in a theatrical role……..
It is difficult for me to reconcile the grandmother in these pictures with the one I knew - to me she was just my lovely, kind granny. There was never any talk of what she used to do - as children we are immersed in our own little worlds and have scant interest in the prior lives of our parents or grandparents. In some of the following photos her ability to strike a pose is noticeable. Perhaps her theatrical training helped her be at ease in front of the camera.
Riga, Summer 1940
Tērvete , 21st March 1943
Identity card, worker at the Tērvete Sanatorium, 1943
1st April, 1943
These few photos together with a couple of others are the only evidence of my young grandmother’s early life before she fled Latvia, prior to emigrating to England. Some of them are obviously official photographs for identity papers, but who took the others? There are always at least three people involved in the photographic process - the subject, the viewer and the photographer, often unknown to the viewer. However, even without knowing the identity of the photographer, their relationship with the subject can often be divined: looking at this beautiful portrait of my grandmother, I can only surmise that the person who took it loved her very much………
