mardi 23 novembre 2004

Photography is in my blood My parents were avid amateur photographers I've always been very conscious of being subjected to, and the subject of, a camera. I'm very lucky in having many photographs of my childhood... most of which I can remember being taken. When I look at photos of my grandparents sitting on a park bench I can close my eyes and not just drift there in my mind but recall the atmosphere, the dripping ice-cream cornet, the smell of the grass, the bushes I used to hide in, the knock of the bowls on the green, the humiditiy of the exotic plant house the goldfish in the slow-running artificial stream with it's rustic bridges, the lazy drone of planes high overhead (DC-3 Dakotas were airliners in those days), lumbering American Superfortresses on their approach-path to Burtonwood Air Base about 20 miles away... many, many things, details, buildings, scenes. And do you know... none of the many, many things, details, buildings, scenes were ever photographed. In those early post-war days film was not just rationed but scarcer than the ration book allocation would have had you believe. The films which my parents managed to obtain were exposed on people... not just family but their wartime friends... and me and my baby-boom friends (especially Paul Kenneth, where are you now?) whenever we played... in the park, at the seaside, watching trains at the station, on our bicycles, country rambling... but always "us", never the surrounding environment, or "it." Even in later years as a teenager if I went camping and rock climbing for the weekend and forgot to take my Box Brownie (or it might have been an Ilford Sportsman by then) my parents would drive out to somewhere they thought we were and walk the hillsides and paths looking and calling for us so we'd have the camera to take the photos to say we'd been there and done it... it was important to record our enjoyment of life. Of course my mother had breast cancer at the time and in those days the radium treatment was harsh. After an eventual double mastectomy she probably knew her days were numbered and therefore made every one of them most enjoyable... and it was an enjoyable 15 years that I remember without having to look back at the black-and-white prints and colour slides which are actually a bonus to have after the event. And although I come from a background of photo snapping I've never appreciated how many photographs my father took during the war. The rejection rate would have been miniscule in those days not just because of the scarcity of film but also because a snap of your comrade fooling about one day may have become the last image for his young widow's mantelpiece after his death. It's obvious though that whoever had a camera in my father's Polish 307 Night-Fighter squadron... then there were photos being taken. I suspect the enthusiasm was because of the uncertainty of life in those days. Up until my father died in 1993 we had lived together at different times for almost thirty-six of my, then, forty-nine years. The uncertainty of life was not an issue... which somehow lessened the necessity of photographing him so often. He didn't photograph me all that often either... and when he did, as when finishing another marathon race which was my sport for a decade, he'd cut my head or legs off every time and the staggering blur that was captured crossing the finishing line didn't really say much about my elation at the end of another 26 plus miles in around 3 hours 20 which, because I was then classified in the veteran age-group, was perhaps his way of telling me to give it up at my age... but when I look back I think, humph... so much for his skills and experience in a photographic family! However, he didn't mind posing for my cameras and various film / developer tests when necessary... the shot at the top being typical of his patience as I quickly wound probably a dozen rolls of 120 film, twelve shots to a roll, through a Mamiya TLR or suchlike. But then when I browse through his remaining photo albums and look at all the images of behind-the-scenes of war, airfields, encampments, on board transit ships, French and Belgian towns in ruins, dress parades, groups of aircrew (often chewing on a long stem grass) the attitudes are remarkably similar... they are all posed... not candids as is the trend today. I'll come back to Woolf again sometime because although I was prompted to write about him after reading Bonnie's Wandering Willow eulogies on her father I haven't done as much. I'll probably build up to it slowly after I've made some prints from negatives I've never enlarged before... there could some interesting images of him which I see in a new light a decade after he departed. Maybe he's up there flying around having the time of his life... I certainly feel he's up there watching over how I tend the garden. And I often imagine him looking over my shoulder with a critical eye when I take a photograph. In real life when he used to offer words of advice, which I'd usually disagree with, he'd just say in his usual Polish way, "Egg wiser than hen!" 9:12:30 PM    comment []