By Farouk Gulsara
During my last visit to my mother’s home, as the house was being refurbished and spring-cleaned to be rented out, the contractor found a rusted chocolate box containing not melted, decomposed chocolate, but a stash of a different kind. Inside its rusted casing were precious pearls of the non-ornamental kind. I was instantly teleported to a window of a different era. Forgotten in the annals of time were photos that were easily close to 70 years old.
Surprisingly, the prints were still in pristine condition, undamaged by the cruel attack of time, a testament to the quality of things back then. In them, my mother looks like the trying but carefree person she was before she was bogged down by caring for children, when she had time to dress up and pose in front of fake props, with a studio photographer hiding under a thick, dark cloak to capture her best angle.
I did not know my father was such a fun person to be with. He appears in some of the prints, posing outdoors. In one, he and his bicycle gang pose, holding their contraptions in front of a towering waterfall. In another, they all took great care to look sharp in pressed shirts, bow ties, and ties, surrounded by lush trees, their humble, proud abodes, though far from architectural marvels.
Somehow, the black-and-white pictures give the impression of a time of bliss, when people were respectful of one another and lived peacefully, not in a pressure-cooker environment like we are in now. People were thinner and definitely younger. I wonder whether life was really just as good on film? Perhaps not. The photos may have only immortalised a single happy moment in their otherwise mundane lives.
These black-and-white and sometimes sepia prints capture intimate details of faces, gestures, textures, shadows, and small imperfections, rekindling a time in the past in a more visual, personal way than modern colour photography can. After all, our dreams are visual, and they are monochromatic.
Funny that all of this was unheard of before the late 19th Century. Not everyone could just get a portrait taken. Most subjects in very old photos, e.g., Abraham Lincoln, look so grouchy because they had to hold their smiles for several minutes to take a single picture. Sometimes, photographers propped them up with rods behind their backs.
People were deeply skeptical of photography in its infancy. As photographers experimented with this new technology, techniques such as ‘double exposure’ produced ghostly images that were sold as the spirits of the dearly departed. Some were convinced that a photograph drew out a piece of one’s ‘living daylight’. Many tribal people were known to be camera-shy for this very reason. Even the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was taken in by the Griffiths sisters’ photograph of fairies in their garden. It turned out to be fake.
Today, photographs replace the original memory of an event or a person. They heal hearts as absence makes them grow fonder. Unfortunately, not too long ago, having a portrait was considered a luxury. Unless someone had a portrait drawn, they could only imagine what a person looked like, especially over many years. Furthermore, a person may have only one photograph taken in their entire life; chances are there would be no images for the family to mourn a dead child. Over the years, the child would be just a fleeting image in everyone’s psyche.
In the mid-1960s, it was vogue to have a professional photographer take a mandatory baby picture in a studio a few months before the first birthday, before the infant could walk. For that, the baby needed to be placed on a hard table on his belly and looking at the camera. The vital prerequisite for this is that the subject must be buck naked, without a thread on the body. I can only imagine how daunting that task would have been. A child at that stage of life would have started recognising faces. A crowded room full of faces, gesturing and asking the baby to strike a good pose, must be hysterically funny.
Fast forward to the present, and we go to great lengths to keep these baby photos out of the mainstream. Compare that to now: a study in the UK found that the average British now is captured in more than 1,000 photos and over 300 videos every year, even pixelated from the time the fetus is in utero!
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Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.
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