Instagram is ten years old next month. I remember at the time being excited by the technology, as my then 12 year old daughter explained it to me. I thought that finally people would begin to engage more deeply with photography, the thing I had been trying to get good at for the previous 25 years. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way, despite the fact that a billion different people posted a picture on the platform last month. My now 22 year old daughter describes it as “everyday life as public performance”.
The group of 12 photographs below are of my mother and father, my sister and my grandmother and yes, the fat little boy with the worried expression is me. They were made over 50 years ago and I suppose were intended to be shared amongst limited family members. I find them enthralling and not just because they are so personal. Most of the compositions are carefully considered, perhaps because each click of the shutter cost a few pence. Yes, they are a record of people I have loved, but the unmistakable colours of Kodachrome slide film, the square format, the black boarders, the dust and scratches all contribute to an unapologetic universal sentimentality. They also ask so many questions and show us uncritically, a world that no longer exists . Why are my bathing trunks frilly? What was my grandmother drinking while lying on the sunchair? Why did the Guards at Windsor Castle have their backs turned to my sister and I? Was my mother pleased with her hairstyle on the cliff at Tynemouth? Did I really believe that dandelion clocks told the time?
And somewhere, well hidden behind the smiling family depicted in the images, I sense a tension… Not a covering up of the truth, or a genuine unhappiness but a repression of emotion. Buttoned up like my sisters heavy tweed coat on an outing to the beach. Perhaps this was just part of being English. Maybe it’s what the suburban life in the late 1960’s demanded. And this unease, in a way, is why I cherish these images so much.
I wonder what or who is going to be the visual “truth teller” for my grandchildren? It certainly won’t be Instagram, and I can’t imagine it will be a 50 year old technologically incompatible hard drive that lies at the bottom of a kitchen drawer.
So my plea is this.. if you understand the importance of imagery as a witness to our lives ….then “PRINT IT OUT”! Not just on the laser printer beside your desk, as it will turn blue and begin to disappear within a few weeks, but properly…. in a way that at least gives our memories a chance of survival. Otherwise I fear that the generation that takes more photographs that ever before in history will leave nothing for their descendants to cherish.