What is it with this incessant urge in people to chronicle their every waking moment, with each brain-purge shamelessly aired via blogs and social networking sites to a world the author believes is panting in breathless anticipation!
Why when I was young we didn’t have Facebook or Twitter. Nor did we have digi cams the size of a cigarette packet. We had pen and paper…and…and…we had to wait days for prints to come back from the lab. Like this self-portrait from 1978 taken while hitching from Sydney to Brisbane. Camera perched on a rock, delayed shutter. Yes I was shameless even then. And if I’d had today’s technology, I would have shared this within 30 seconds instead of waiting 30 years ;-D
Being in a certain fiftyish age group, I’ve started asking the big questions; Where do we come from? How did I get into photography? What’s for dinner? And with both parents passed on, it’s old family photos that help fill in some of these gaps. Dad was a keen photographer and so our family is well documented in that regard. My earliest memories of a family camera are the type where at the press of a button the lens would unfold on a concertina bellows from the camera body. The pleats of that bellows were just crying out to be poked inward by a pudgy digit. So I did. Strangely I cannot remember the camera in the photo below. The view-finder is on top and light enters the upper lens (the one I am NOT covering with my fingers) strikes a mirror and is reflected upward to form an image on a ground-glass panel. You can see that some light has continued on to pool on my forehead. What I seem to be doing, by covering each lens in turn, is working out which hole at the front is ‘making’ the image that I can see in the view finder. And I like to think that Dad both saw the dancing highlights on my face AND heard the whirring of tiny cogs in my head when he made this picture.
