My friend Alicia Bruce recently asked her Instagram followers an interesting question: What’s your first memory of a photograph?

There’s a few reasons I think this is interesting: I believe the act of both being photographed and photographing others can make particular events more memorable than they otherwise would be.

But I also think the material photos themselves can get confused with genuine memory – my recall of particular things sometimes extends little further than a given snapshot, which gives me a strange outside-looking-in perspective on the event in question if I’m the subject of the image. Such is the case I think with the answer I gave to Alicia, which concerns something which took place when I was six (my childhood memories are – generally speaking – quite vague).

I went to Malta on holiday as a kid (my 6th bday was there) and one day we went to a beach which should have been lovely, except it turned out to be flying ant day. The sand was covered with dead flying ants, and the water close to the shore. We have a family photo of me stood in this horrible anty water with my inflatable armbands on. It’s seared in my memory. I think it’s one of my first photographic memories.

This trip down memory lane led me to seek out the photo when I visited my mum’s house, and to keep it for posterity. Here it is, my first photo memory. Most of the other respondents wrote about being given their first cameras but I think my memory of this fairly weird event is constructed and shaped by the fact there is photographic evidence. The black stuff all over the sand…. that’s the flying ant corpses. Yuck.