Les Back remembers

By Professor Les Back, Department of Sociology

In the angry Eighties when I graduated from Goldsmiths with a degree in Geography & Social Anthropology many refused to attend the ceremony as a radical gesture. The grandeur of the Royal Albert Hall - where it took place in those days – was just too much bourgeois affectation.

But for me, as the first in my extended family to be awarded a degree, refusing to attend was just not an option: it would have been like committing kinship suicide. Denying my parents that vicarious pleasure would have been cruelly ungrateful. They had given so much to get me through college but not necessarily in financial terms unlike today.

So I attended graduation and this is the photograph that was taken. I remember having to borrow a tie last minute from a friend on the day of the ceremony, which flattered me to be more stylish than I actually was.

Graduation photos often convey a hopeful look. It is a look to the future and a life ahead that remains to be decided. Even though your family do not appear they solicit that hopeful look because they have made the achievement being celebrated possible. It is why graduands give these portraits to their families. This one still hangs above the chair my eighty-year-old mother is confined to all day and beneath it is my degree certificate in a frame.