Firstly, a warning. I'm gearing up for a rant and probaby something of a ramble...
A few weeks ago while I was idly poking around in an antique shop off Camden Road, I found a big boxfull of old family photographs from the first half of the 20th century. Incorigible sentimentalist that I am, I ended up buying a handful of these pictures in an attempt to preserve them from landfill. A couple of them I thought were particularly evocative are now blu-tacced to the wall above my desk, pretending to be heirlooms of mine or Claire's family.
Recently I've been looking at a lot of photographic images and film from the fifties and sixties - astronauts and cosmonauts, Kennedy, Nixon, suburban houses in America with pristine lawns and housewives with domesic appliances that do wonderful things with gelatine...
It strikes me that besides the historical distance between those subjects and the present, there's a certain tonal quality to these images that root them firmly in their own particular time - the saturated colours, the red bleed of overexposure on the end of a film that ‘ruins’ the family portrait; the small, grainy, round-edged photos of a cheap automatic camera in the late 70s; the misty sepia of a victorian portrait.
When I think of the Moon landings and Kennedy, I think of poorly composed super8 footage, in colours that look painted on or guessed at in retrospect. My perception of these things is filtered through the texture of the period’s photographic technology. And because of this, when I see other pictures that have this kind of tone, even of things I don’t recognise, they carry meaning for me by association, by shared tone. They have a kind of weight that is carried in the medium itself.
The digital camera now captures images with a level of precision not even visible to the naked eye. A consequence of this, maybe, is that these tonal qualties and imperfections have been lost.
I’ve been to a couple of birthdays or weddings in the last year or two, where a Polaroid camera has gone round, for people to take pictures and then stick them in a book, along with a caption or birthday wish, etc. Even though everyone in the room has a camera, the Polaroid images (with their old fashioned, nostalgic quality – a lack of perfection maybe) seem to have a greater legitimacy. Maybe it's that they give a stronger sense of the past.
Everone has a camera now, and they are out all the time. When I was little, pictures were taken of holidays, christenings, weddings and remarkable things like snow. They were taken of events. The expense of film and the time needed to actually fill a roll and develop it meant that weeks and months might pass before you ever looked at the pictures, so when you did, it was an act of remembering.
Now, I go for a night out and everyone seems to spend half the night taking pictures of themselves and their friends, and the other half looking at the pictures they just took of themselves and their friends. I do it myself (though I'm trying to cut back).
Rather than providing evidence of the past, photographs now seem instead to be providing us with evidence of the present, and the images we record become more real to us than reality itself. They are hyper-real.
It's a bit odd.
