Family Album

Take anyone our age and their family photos look - familiar.

They start with the baby in the receiving blanket, and then out in the park in the shade of an imposing cedar (or perhaps for us, even an elm) sitting up in an enormous Silver Cross pram with mother in a dress that you’d be thrilled to find in a funky vintage clothing boutique.

Next comes the christening, with mother and grandmother in hats, dress and matching jacket or coat, possibly even gloves depending on the season. Absolutely everyone was christened in those days , and went to Sunday school too.

Before you know it, we’re on the pier, the colours faded to pastel, keeping warm in hideous handknitted cardigans. There’s a picnic beside the Morris Traveller, making a snowman (more handknitting: mittens and balaclavas), gap-toothed school photos with messy-haired siblings, andthe inevitable rainy camping trip.

Progressing on to seniors, there’s the new bike, orchestra or football or swimming festivals and more bracing British beaches. We’re becoming more self-conscious now, looking sidelong or even away, our arms and legs too long, our features growing before the rest of our faces and leaving us feeling ungainly and awkward.

If you notice carefully, if you made a year by year photo study of a person growing up from the Sixties until now, you’d see that they don’t regain their confidence in front of the lens until very much later in life. That uncomfortable feeling from those difficult teen years takes a long time to wear off - if it ever does.

Unless you happened to be the child of a photo-journalist, any amount of study of a chronology of your life from your photo album would be a false, weird, skewed, view. If a person in a thousand years’ time tried to learn about the twentieth century from family photos, he’d think that our lives consisted principally of constructing elaborate sandcastles, wearing fancy dress, opening gifts and going on the ferry to the Isle of Wight. Our religion must include ceremonies with cakes – lighting them and blowing them out, cutting them; and with clothes - white dresses, black gowns and strange hats, little ties in a bow at the neck.

The photos don’t show many of the real turning points because we don’t photograph those. Even when we recognise them we don’t take a photo. You might have your wedding photos in there, but not the day you agreed to get engaged when you already knew it was a mistake. You won’t have your grandad’s funeral, or the day got turned down for the university you really wanted or the sports team you hoped to play for. You won’t have a picture sitting up in hospital the day you lost the baby, or throwing up on the hard shoulder of the M1 when you got so drunk after that big argument in Scarborough. And we don’t see the long, slow slide into frustration and boredom and maybe even despair – you just stop appearing in the pictures: you’re the photographer now. Observing life rather than living it.

Sometimes if you look at someone else’s photos, they’re so very similar that you start to compare notes. This was where? And when? And you were how old? Sometimes even, you work out you were in the same place at the same time. How funny! What a small world after all.

And then you have to wonder What If. Even when you never allow yourself to play that game. What if you had met that awkward-looking, self-conscious young adult, when you too were gawky and skinny and too shy to look straight on at the camera? How might things have been different? How many of those non-photographed bad parts could have been avoided? Or does the gift of making people smile and blossom and grow into themselves, to tread firmly and take the world head-on, does that only come later in life, because of all the other things?

Everything would have been different.

Well, of course it would have been. That’s obvious. But would it have been better? Or is the journey from centre-of-attention, to observer, to frustration at being a spectator, to stepping back onto the pitch and entering the game again, is that an inevitable trajectory?

I want the impossible. I want to turn back the clock. I want to meet that young man. I want to make him laugh in his photos.