Those of you who are old enough will remember this. Those of you who aren’t, can imagine it.
You see, ‘useable’ digital photography has only been around for about 10% of the history of photography, and that’s pushing the point a little strenuously if you really get down to the nitty gritty. But we now have a generation of people who have known nothing else and who think that anything other than pixels and electronic software comes from a time when we were still throwing rocks at our dinner and hitting each other over the head with large knobbly clubs.
But I remember, as a small boy, going down to the local camera shop at the weekend with my dad and watching him chatting with the owner as he handed him a roll of film. The owner then handed my dad a slip of paper which had a number on it. Then, next weekend we went back again and after my dad handed back the piece of paper which identified his roll, his film re-appeared from the back room, now developed and presented in neat strips. He then pored over the negatives on the shop’s light box with a magnifier and told the man which of the negatives he wanted printing.
Yet another weekend later saw us back at Matt Skipp’s camera shop to collect the prints. On our way there you could stir the sense of anticipation with a big wooden spoon. Then, there they were, in all their glorious 1960s colour. 1960s colour was different to today’s. But did that matter? Did it heck. It was magic. We couldn’t wait to get back home and show mum. Those photographs transported us back to all the various days when dad’s old Leica camera emerged from his even older camera bag.
There are two important things to all this. The big one being that you couldn’t see the picture as soon as you pressed the shutter button. That’s a really big thing on the anticipation side of things in your life. And the other thing was all the traipsing back and forth to the camera shop afterwards. It was bit like comparing a Japanese tea ceremony to chucking a teabag into a chipped mug and sloshing some boiling water over it.
Actually, there’s another thing. And this one is the real biggie. All those photographs are still in the album with neat writing under them about where, when, who and what? And you can touch them. They are actually a thing. They exist in the world, and they are 55 years old. They are not a collection of electronic values only visible courtesy of a monitor’s interpretation of the numbers fed into it. You can put one in your back pocket or in your wallet, if you want to.
These bits of photographic paper with scribbled notes on the back, in drawers all over the country, are not only memories, but are a social history. Nobody is saying the memories can’t be saved electronically, because they can and they are being. But how much of today’s social history do you think will actually be looked at 100 years from the day you pushed the button on your mobile phone and saw the result straight away and then almost immediately forgot about it because it was all too easy.
So, ask yourself … where are all your photographs?