A Little Magic In Cromwell

Yesterday I had a pretty special talk about my photography journey and how photography has taught me about looking and seeing.  The talk was for some of the older citizens of Cromwell, at the Care and Friendship group which meets every other week in the Catholic Church hall.

I hope my audience was entertained. They were certainly very kind in their praise afterwards. What really struck me was how open they were to the possibilities of digital photography and abstract art. With an average age of around 80, they were very open minded.

But there was a part of the talk where I think I may have gained more than they did.

To help me along with what is quite a conversational talk, I took along a few props. I have quite a collection of old cameras, from Box Brownies through to my first digital camera, so I decided to use them to tell a little bit of my own history through the changing technology.  I started with my Nana's Box Brownie. That led to a conversation about women often being the family photographer, and the importance of those ordinary family photographs that become part of our history.  Then there was my Dad's Beauty Beaumat 35mm rangefinder camera. It recorded so many photographs of his younger years on slide film, when you had to wait what seemed like forever for your slides to come back from the lab.  There were a few more old cameras, including a Kodak Instamatic which witnessed my first blurry photographic experiments, and an old Canon film SLR which really showed me the magic of shooting manually.  And finally, my current Fuji medium format camera.

Quite a journey in a handful of cameras.

My audience enjoyed all of this and there was plenty of interaction, but as I was talking, I found myself thinking about our everyday relationship with photography.  Photography has always been about recording our existence. Our families, our homes, our holidays, the people we love, the ordinary things we did and the places we lived. A lot of it probably did not seem particularly remarkable at the time, but becomes really important as the years pass.

For this group, the history of photography has taken place within their own lifetimes. They have lived through the journey from the Box Brownie, through film and slides, to digital photography and now cameras that are beginning to surpass the technical quality we once associated with film.

The technology has changed enormously.  But really, the important part has not.  It is still about what we see.  That was a compelling reminder for me. I occupy that rather rarified space of being a “fine art photographer”, where we talk about artistic vision, interpretation and the finished work.  But sitting in that hall in Cromwell, surrounded by people who have spent their lives taking photographs of much more ordinary things, I was reminded that photography belongs to ordinary life before it belongs to the art world.

And perhaps that is something worth remembering.  Because underneath all the cameras, technology and techniques, photography is still a wonderfully simple human act.  We look. We notice something. We want to remember it.

I have the time and, I realise, a certain privilege to spend a lot of my life doing exactly that. I can slow down enough to really look at a landscape, a patch of lichen, a piece of old machinery or the way the light falls on familiar ground. I can photograph it, experiment with it, interpret it and eventually turn that little moment of noticing into a finished piece of work that someone else can live with on their wall.

There is a bit of magic in that and I know that I should never take it for granted.  Maybe that is what photography has taught me most of all.