Ghost Image: Where I Was When Kennedy Was Shot

I took this oddly voyeuristic photo with my first camera, an old Zenit, while standing in our front garden looking through half-open curtains into 'the drawing room' of our old house in Stillorgan, Co Dublin. The blurred figure is my grandfather. I was in my early twenties, beginning to experiment with photography, play with ways of looking.

When Kennedy visited Ireland I was six. As far as I recall, we went to the airport and waved flags, both tricolours and stars & stripes. The flags were later mounted behind the brass-framed oval mirror in the 'dining room' at the back of the house, where they gathered dust for 30 years or so, till we sold up and moved in 1990.

Kennedy was shot just five months after that visit. I have a dim memory of people being upset, possibly quietly crying, a subdued funeral atmosphere in the house, in particular in the aforementioned drawing room (essentially our living room) at the front of the house, where grandmother and my mother had their afternoon tea. You can make out the TV in the background and in the foreground to the left, the edge of grandmother's rocking chair where she'd sit and watch, or more likely shield herself behind The Evening Press, glancing up every so often (at The Good Old Days, The Black & White Minstrel Show, Morcambe and Wise...)

The ghostly image seems appropriate for this brief, as the very memory of that day is shadowy, almost shaded out. And they are all ghosts now: my grandmother, grandfather (the man of the house) and recently my mother. And the house itself (completely renovated and enlarged by the new occupants) is itself a ghost. It haunts me.