I’m on Instagram so I can follow friends I like how immediate it is. I’m embarrassed to say that my main camera is my iPhone. When I’m going on an assignment, I never know which cameras to take. I take a fair amount on my iPhone, quite a few on my 35mm Leica, plus on my digital camera, and I have a Polaroid, too. The confusing thing for me is how many different ways there are of taking photos. If I take an image that I really like, it feels more real if it’s caught on film if I’ve shot it digitally, I feel it could just disappear. But it’s still hard to do a proper shoot, or go into depth it takes a lot of time and attention. I still think in film: I always have. It’s true that every kid can take pictures that you could use or publish, and there are a lot more being documented. Now, I realise that not everyone has the eye. She mentioned it often my mum and dad discussed photography a lot.īecause I grew up around it, I assumed everyone could take pictures. Mum grew up in New York and she got into photography after seeing the famous Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Edward Steichen. But she took me there one day and I remember seeing a blank page put into a chemical bath and becoming a photograph. We didn’t really have any of her pictures around the house, but there was a Jacques-Henri Lartigue, and an Edward S Curtis portait of some native Americans. I would see her taking photos a lot, though she didn’t do much printing. I have a vivid early memory of going to a darkroom with my mum. Mary McCartney PhotographerĪ recent photograph of Mary McCartney horseriding But tentatively, decades too late, I have made a start. And it’s too late for me to compete with the poet Hugo Williams, who has been taking his camera to parties and book launches for decades and who must by now have one of the great literary photo-archives of our time. My shots from the Shard at night were disappointing. More to the point, I own an iPhone and have begun to take snaps. I now have a photo folder on my computer, for emailed pictures sent by friends and family. The results have been pasted in albums and dated, and every so often I get them out to see what we got up to. But she at least has been diligent down the years, with box cameras, Polaroids, disposables and (most recently) a digital Canon. Why my wife and I never bought a video camera, I don’t know (laziness? expense?). He also had a cine camera, and I sometimes feel guilty that my own children, unlike me, have no moving images of themselves to look back on. My father’s childhood was heavily documented by comparison, and he was scrupulous about documenting his children’s, first in tiny black-and-white prints, then with colour transparencies, which were looked at through a viewfinder or (at the annual Christmas slide show put on for my long-suffering cousins) on a white screen. I felt shut out from her past, and the lack of pictures was part of the reason. There were none of her large family, either. The earliest image I had of her till then was a graduation photo, taken in Dublin. My favourite photo is one of my mother in pigtails as a child, an image unknown to me until a few years ago, after her death, when a cousin sent it. Worse, though, would be to have none at all. Larkin has a poem about how memories “link us to our losses” by showing us “what we have as it once was,/Blindingly undiminished, just as though/By acting differently we could have kept it so.” That’s the effect old photos have on me. But those photographic images are a source of sorrow, whereas the images in my head are not. It’s sentimental, I know: time passes the moment goes even as the shutter clicks. But a few were trick photos, such as the one with my mother, sister and me arranged above each other on a steep hill, to look like acrobats standing on each other’s shoulders.ĭespite their playfulness, my chief feeling when I look at those photos is sadness: that most of the people in them are now dead that the times they commemorate can’t be retrieved. Most of his snaps were taken without us noticing. But he wasn’t absent, merely hiding behind the lens of his Nikon. A stranger looking through my childhood photos might deduce a) that we were perpetually on holiday in north Wales, and b) that my father never accompanied us. Cameras were more demanding then, and I hadn’t the patience. I tell myself I’ve never owned a camera, but that doesn’t square with a memory of being given one as a birthday present in my teens, and of a losing struggle with light, shade, aperture, distance, angle, focus. Blake Morrison aged eight on a beach in Wales
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