mercredi 8 décembre 2004

Like Father, Like Son Who remembers Polyfoto? The importance of being and the importance of photographing life's ups and downs was brought home to me some years ago in the most emotional of personal circumstances when my father died. In some respects, because of the amount of photographic evidence he left behind, I now see my father Woolf in a different way. From pictures of him taken by an unknown airman leaning against a Spitfire somewhere in northern France... to my pictures of him gardening or cutting our daily firewood in Wiltshire and then Wales, there are hundreds of black-and-white images of him as well as his wife and their child doing things and going places. Now whether it was because of my parent's obsession with taking black-and-white snaps of everything that moved in the Buziak household that I eventually became a photographer is open to conjecture... I clearly remember having never relished a camera being pointed at me... and I still don't. But however I felt and whatever face I pulled the tiny image in the camera's viewfinder was enough to make one of my parents click, wind slowly on to the next number behind the ruby-red window (they did that with absolute accuracy for fear of wasting a single frame on the film) and then write down some quite personal details of what had just been photographed as well as basic technical data on how it had been recorded... just in case it didn't come out properly and they could work out why. Decades later, after I had updated their Kodak 127 folder to a 35mm Olympus Trip, they did exactly the same... and I have an archive of their carefully written notes and details down to what time of day it was. Some of their comments, even if the pictures don't show it, make me realise how selfish childhood is. For example in the 1950s after a five hour drive from Manchester to Anglesey in an old Ford Eight I was noted to have said as father switched off the engine, "If we go straight back now we'll be just in time to watch Robin Hood on the television." The odd thing is that not having owned a television set for about thirty years those diminutive black-and-white photographs are a regular source of visual enjoyment on dark winter evenings. Our family photo albums dating from wartime (when film was extremely scarce and probably bought with a lot of ration coupons on the black market) with tiny deckle-edged more-sepia-than black-and-white prints held to the thick cartridge paper by decorative corner mounts, certainly tell a story in themselves. The many boxes of colour slides from the past two or three decades are something else too... flash power was available to all and the pictures reveal much more of indoor life with Christmas, Birthday, Name-day and Easter celebrations being photographed without fail. In fact any excuse for a get together with a few friends, enjoy a five-, seven- or nine-course meal (always an odd number), after which the carpet was rolled-up and the night was danced away to the strains of Polish polka and the effects of Polish vodka. When you think about it "family snaps" are invaluable to our future generations... it almost doesn't matter what we take as long as we take them. And although the joke has always been that most people have family snaps simply gathering dust in shoe boxes because nobody wants to look at them... at least they have them. Today's family snaps risk being deleted from the camera or computer storage disk with hardly a thought for tomorrow. It doesn't matter how technically good or bad those pictures are, they are still memories of times gone by and should be retained for the future! Hopefully as time goes on we become better with photo technicalities and record more memories than our parents could... after all, we've got darkrooms or computers and the equipment to preserve our past whereas many of our parents had to make do with the local Polyfoto Studio and its reorder forms. Of course the Polyfoto chain disappeared many years ago and with it the many millions of negatives that held our smiling, crying, laughing or scowling faces (see above contact sheet of 48 images of me aged five or six). Gone also are the hundreds of my family's black-and-white negatives... faded beyond hope through the poor materials or processing of the day. Also an alarming number of my parents colour slides from the 1970s are showing signs of fungus growth and on many the the original bright colours are viewed through a magenta veil. But nothing can make me throw them away... even the ones where Woolf, in his excitement, cut my head off as I staggered to a marathon race finish! All these little gems don't add up to another "Diary of a Century," that magnificent volume of photographs and writings by French photographer and socialite Jacques-Henri Lartigue, but they do chronicle family life as seen through the eyes of a devoted couple... my parents. I know some readers of my weblog do the same and get great pleasure from their efforts. Their photographs are purely personal and almost for their eyes only. But occasionally magic moments do happen, are recorded, then printed and are shown to future generations. What can start out as family fun, whether of your children or pets or granny knitting a jumper can end up being an image that others treasure for the rest of their lives. I hope you're getting the message... shoot now or you'll regret it later. I used to get too concerned with both the technical and creative aspects of photography, camera equipment and processing rather than thinking more about the plain recordingside of it... and I did miss many opportunities. I suppose one piece of good advice would be to make sure you shoot off a roll of black-and-white film every month or so... you may not produce any real winners (who's judging them anyway?) but I'm sure you won't end up with any losers either. 9:24:18 PM    comment []