I stumbled across a baby photo the other day while sorting through things in the study. It was a studio shot, taken when I guess I was about 18 months old.
I am sitting up straight with a small ball at my feet, wearing a dress with smocking down the front, very fashionable for the times. How they managed to get me to sit still, let alone look at the photographer is a mystery.
The photo was still in the raised and edged frame that it was put in eons ago, somehow managing to survive move after move through my adult life. The photo was coloured after the event, touched up in the developer’s room, with hints of red around my lips and colour on the dress. Real colour photography was far too expensive for the likes of my family.
Expensive hobby
Now, if you too are of a certain age you won’t have many baby photos at all. Even into my late childhood, cameras and hence photos were expensive.
Most of my early years are chronicled through the once-a-year school photo, where we are lined up, row after row, tallest at the back, short ones seated on the ground or on the small chairs.
Our school class year was chalked on a small blackboard held by some luckless child in the front row. Maybe some of the names of our classmates are scrawled in childish print on the back of the photo.
As I became an adult, most of us could afford a camera but, even so, the cost of developing that film was not cheap.
How many of us were careful with what shots we took to only find when they came back from the developers, that they were blurred, or that most of the shots of people were far too distant and downright awful?
Pull focus
Our skills were poor and we had to wait weeks for the developing. Sometimes we put the film in the camera badly, or the film was exposed to light before developing and our results were just depressing blackness, overexposed and worthless. Moments lost to memory.
Then, of course, came our smartphones and digital photography to help us capture the absurdities of our lives. To say that this has revolutionised our photography would be a gross understatement.
We now extend our arm to snap selfies, we inundate social media with our faces, our food and our fantasies, believing the hype of influencers and their fads.
Now the quality of the camera in our phones has grown to the point of equalling if not bettering many standalone cameras.
We take hundreds of shots, deleting the silly grin or the poorly posed shot, looking for perfection. We load our phone with photos and then pay to store them in the cloud.
Weird contradiction
But there is a weird contradiction in all of this – do we look at them? It strikes me that this is the absurdity of the modern situation – we can take thousands of photos, records of our lives, but we rarely look at them and certainly don’t seem to bother with hard copy albums anymore. I feel that is a pity.
However, we are fortunate today to have endless photos and recall of our lives, denied most generations. We even have them as homemade videos, giving life to our bodies and remembrances of our voices and mannerisms. Now, not just our looks are captured for the future to stare at and to reminisce, seeing people in funny clothes. So, I am happy with the trend, just don’t capture my bad side or my bad hair day!
Do you have your baby album? Why did you keep it? Why not share your experience in the comments section below?
Also read: Why it’s the small things that make me feel grateful to be alive