Images of a forgotten time

For something so boring and simply numeric, the turn of the millennium felt like the biggest deal in the world. Everything for half my life had been leading up to this moment. Adverts on TV, discussions at school, headlines in the newspapers. Everything. A box of cereal would have some reference to the millennium on it. News reports about how the computers we would handle a number ticking up by 1, killing millions. We had just found out about Pokémon. Think what’s next? I can’t overstate how important it felt as a 6-year-old. This was it. We even decided to build a huge dome in our capital city for this event for some reason. It’s still there.

Anticipation overspilled. The day had finally come. Humans have seemingly waited a thousand years for this. “Sydney already had their celebrations, they’re in the future!”. Evening came, we bundled into the cars in the depths of winter and drove to the Portsmouth seafront. We had just moved down to the English south coast, after spending my life so far in Scotland. It was never going to match the beauty of rural Aberdeenshire. But here, at least, we could experience the millennium with more people around. They were even building a tower for it [1].

The cars arrived, and we alighted. Excited bodies stood around waiting for the fireworks to begin. I had my camera with me, intent on capturing this momentous occasion for future generations. Just imagine what my grandchildren would think of my photos from the millennium. I could say I was there. That I captured it, as society moved on to the next step. The future. The year 2000.

The sky starts to illuminate. Booms ring out across the bay.

I press the shutter button. Again. And again.

A week passes, my parents take the film to Boots. A 2-hour turnaround. Not bad. The envelope containing the printed pictures gets handed to me.

You cannot see anything in any of the photos.

Photography has always been “my thing”. When I was wee, I was given a plastic Fisher Price kids' camera. With this fresh new tool in hand, I kind of gave myself the task of documenting the “things” we did. Holidays, Christmas, family visits, the millennium. I could see no reason not to take photos of absolutely everything. So for the last 25 years, I have tried to take photos of as much as I could.

Starting at the beginning, and looking through my first photos, there are many things I like about them. I like that they are “bad” photos. They are all poorly exposed. The framing is all over the place (kids love a good Dutch angle), something I still struggle to do today. Some of them are just straight up out of focus and blurry, basically unused. Ultimately, though, they feel more real because of the flaws they possess. Taken by someone who was just trying to capture something.

Take these, for example.

For you, these are probably not that interesting. There is nothing in their content that is particularly fun to look at. But they show something to me, and you’ll have photos like this, which mean something to you too. These are from my time in Scotland, which, as time passes, I remember vanishingly little about. These photos are a little portal into my memories of that time. When I see that sandpit in the photo, where previously there was a void, the memory becomes clear. Moving and shaping the sand, making little race track circuits to run my matchbox vehicles around. If it wasn’t for these photos, these memories would probably be gone forever.

There are photos I have taken for every year of my life that are like this. From the age of 3, through my teenage years, to now.

I think we should give all kids a camera. A real one, not a phone. They won’t get a second chance at capturing the memories, and you also get their unique viewpoint. An old digital camera would be enough. Light and cheap for hands big or small. Maybe it’s not like this for you, but for me, those memories that I captured are so much stronger than those that I didn’t.

If it were affordable (and it isn’t), I would recommend that anyone use film to take photos every now and then. Even if it’s just a cheap modern disposable, just buy a couple and take them when you go on holiday. There is something about the photos themselves going through a bunch of physical processes, from pressing the shutter to viewing them, which makes it special. You are also limited in the number of photos you can take, so you spend extra time and thought to make sure you take meaningful ones. And when some of the photos inevitably don’t work, that is great too. That forms part of the story of the photos. Each step of taking these photos is just different from the photos I usually take every day on my phone. It’s a fantastic magic trick. Capturing light interacting with crystals spread over a piece of plastic, made permanent in a dark room by an alchemist. There is nothing like it.

Printing photos is something I don’t know if people do anymore. It’s that I can hold an individual photo and look at it outside of a screen. These old ones from childhood have been printed on the cheap paper Boots used for their quick turnaround. But you can feel them in your hands, pick them up, put them into a book, re-arrange them, cut them up. Photo printing has gotten even more expensive in the last couple of years, but I think it’s worth it to hold these memories. I do it when I can for my film photos, just to hold them.

There is something wonderful about just the act of wanting to remember. A place, a friend, a moment. There is a collective understanding we have that there will come a time, one day, when you will not remember this. What you are experiencing, then, when, now, it's transient.

Forgetting stuff is something I think about a lot. Every day since my heart surgery, I have become more forgetful. I wish it were because I was just getting older. Maybe it is, but it wasn’t like this before. It’s like a gnawing, eating away at my past. It creates an emptiness where precious memories used to live. It affects my memory of the moments that happened 20 years ago, and the moments that happened 20 seconds ago. It's the hardest bit, besides the whole heart thing.

I have taken tens of thousands of photos throughout my life. I will hopefully take tens of thousands more. This year I have taken around 1200 film photos, and over 3000 photos with my phone. Those photos allow me to have some semblance of memory. If you ask me what I did at the weekend, or what I’ve been up to since we last met, I will probably look at my phone's picture roll and use that as a guide. Because I will forget it all otherwise. It is embarrassing, but I am making do with what I have right now.

I am meandering a lot here, talking about film photos and why I think they’re great. But don’t mistake it for not also loving my phone's camera. Without it, I don’t know how I could remember my life. There are aesthetic things I consider with film photos that don’t even cross my mind when it comes to phone photos. Because I point, I shoot, I remember. Almost all my phone photos are in portrait, because I know I will only look at them on my phone. My picture book scratch pad acting as a replacement brain.

There’s something I want to say here, but I don’t really know what. There was a point, but I forgot. I started writing this months ago.

Do you remember Tumblr, back in the day? I used to use it to view other people's photos quite often, back when I thought I could be a photographer. I liked how pure it could be. Very little text, and your photos. I occasionally posted my photos on there. No one looked at them. I liked that.

Sharing for the sake of sharing. On most platforms, you must chase the algorithm, following and influence. I don’t share on Twitter because it’s full of racists and cunts that want to ruin people's day. I don’t have a Facebook account anymore because I don’t want that much data about me available to the company. So I use Instagram in a basic capacity. An app that allows me to just post as much as I want, to basically no one. I take up server space for the sake of it. I just want to post and share pictures from my phone and my camera, and leave. That’s how my photos are meant to be. They’re for me, and for you. No one else.

When I was 16, I did not get my predicted GCSE grades. I was depressed, abused, and lost. But I loved taking pictures. I used a Nikon D5000, a mid-level DSLR, which for the time was great. A definitive upgrade from the Pentax DSLR I had been using for the 3 years prior. For out and about, I had my Sony Ericsson K800i.

I would move to sixth form that September, and I wanted to do photography. But I had fucked my Art GCSE grade, only achieving a C, below the high standards of the sixth form in Cambridge, where I was to attend. Sixth form informed of my grades, I was asked to come in a week or two before the new school year started, and to bring in a portfolio of photos I had taken to show to the photography teacher to see whether I would be a good match. I arrived and handed him my book of pictures. He looked at the photos. He told me no, I was not good enough. I ended up doing Philosophy instead.

Someone said to me a while ago that I was good at everything. I think this rejection was the moment I decided, at the very least, to always be earnest in whatever I attempted, and to try at the things I care about. I am not good at everything. In fact, I think I am good at very little. And I have been imperfect in my attempts at trying over the years. But I know, now, the only thing that matters is that I do try. For me. I hope you try for what matters to you, too.

I will keep taking photos until the day I die. Maybe I will take photos that day too. They hold no artistic weight, but I will still consider them art. Your photos are art too. My photos will hold no value to you, but they will hold memories for me. I will share them with you, and hope you share with me too.

Maybe I will start a Tumblr again. I hear it has been making a comeback.

[1] Construction of the tower wouldn’t start until after the millennium in 2001, and it wouldn’t open until 2005. Because of the delay, the Millennium Tower ended up being called Spinnaker Tower. Calling it Millennium Tower 5 years after the millennium would just look silly.