Camera Shy

Nothing is so boring now as when people get their cameras or videos out (probably disguised as phones). This generation is the most photographed and filmed of any since the world began. There is in everybody's household a plethora, a Mount Everest of photos and film. Every biscuit tin or old shoe box is filled to the brim with photos.

Albums, those lovely thick leathery book like containers for pictures so lovingly compiled by a previous generation, all the family holidays and events tagged with witty, carefully crafted lines such as “Matthew and Andrew look for crabs” under a picture of the two children with fishing nets over their shoulders, the special nights at a restaurant celebrating a birthday, all holding drinks in the air imagining being so original like being in a night club in Hollywood. The big white wedding albums that the photographer would charge a fortune for and all the guest at the wedding would feel obliged to fork out for something they’d only look at once especially if it was only a distant cousin that had got married. All those pictures that one dreaded being brought out when one visited, those hard to suppress yawns while wondering how quickly it could be suggested that one went home. All these have been abandoned, just snap and look instantly at someone's phone, another reason to groan inwardly.

The class and area I was born into took very few photos. If someone in the family was lucky enough to own a Brownie, which was the only camera most of us had ever heard of, there was some taken but film was expensive and, in wartime, hard to come by. The weather had to be right, the sun shining on the photographers back, his hand had to be steady, the posers had to be still with fixed smiles on their faces, no such thing as action or natural photos but maybe just as natural as today's photos when everyone acts as though they are in a sitcom on television and poses accordingly.

There was of course the professionals. Our local one was someone called Griffin, they had a shop in Armagh Road in Bow and everyone I knew, not only my family but in the street or at school had their photos done at Griffins. I’m sitting with a big book called ‘Teddy Bear” dressed in my best clothes aged about six. Kenny my younger brother his hair all curly and long like a girls had a similar one but he was only about three. Many years later my sister, had a carefully crafted picture taken with her friend Joan in which they look like two carefully made up starlets from the J Arthur Rank film school of charm.

We are all blasé now. Fatigued by photos. We wave away in mock horror those that want to take our image, we know what we look like and, in some ways worse, what we sound like. There’s no illusions left, we can no longer imagine we look like Margaret Lockwood or Phyllis Calvert, James Mason or Stewart Granger, there’s no Clark Gables or Hedy Lamarrs hiding amongst us, our dreams have been shattered because we’ve all been caught ‘au naturel’ as we really look.

Its sad though, as we ever hurtle faster and faster into modernity everything we gain costs us. So many little pleasures gone. Looking at old photos of the past was something we took for granted and with close families it was always pleasant to be reminded of some of the good things that happened. We are so much richer materially than we have ever been but so much poorer for what we’ve lost, Sunday Dinner, the whole family enjoying a roast, going to the pub on a Sunday morning with your Dad and Uncles, the Joy of going to the library the sheer peace and tranquility of the libraries, the quiet discipline that everyone imposed on themselves, finding information not on the internet but searching for it and relying on memory. Listening to the news at 6pm on the wireless and the news really being new instead of the same stories over and over again every hour from 7 am till midnight.

Going to the seaside, even though if you chose the wrong week it could be raining how one looked forward to it with such excitement, whereas nowadays people tell you they’ve been to Dubai or Indonesia, or the Dominican republic with such insouciance and matter of factness that one yawns and longs to be deep in the highlands or the Lake district where nature still bears some resemblance to reality, as long as its off season.

It would be nice to go to a restaurant where it was not too expensive and that served food that was nicely cooked but wasn’t extraordinary in its description and where chips were chips and not hand carved or fat, I would like to buy a packet of crisps that didn't;t tell you who picked the potatoes and who sliced them up and who put them in the vat of fat and cooked them. Yes this information is on the back of many packets.

We all of us young and old look back on the past, me more than most, and much of it is illusory as LP. Hartley wrote: “The past is another country” and it certainly is but it still seemed a kinder, nicer place.