Through the Lens

I have a number of books on local history at home and I frequently find myself flicking through one or other of them, fascinated by the photographs that show Romford and the surrounding areas as they were many years ago. It is interesting to look at pictures of Romford Market Place in 1900 for instance, to see the cattle in their pens, to see the pubs that have long since closed and the shops that were doing business in those days.

The changes that have taken place since these photos were taken are striking; most striking are how rural our town was in those days. The dusty lane with its single car or even a horse and cart is now the ring road; that country inn, outside which sits a drayman’s horse and cart is now a gastropub.

We are lucky that there are as many photographs that survive from the early twentieth century, when photography was generally a much more formal art. Many of the pictures from that time are so carefully and obviously posed; the cameras were bulkier and the preserve of specialists rather than the common man. The act of taking a photograph or being photographed was evidently much more of an occasion in those days.

The Victorian camera did not lend itself to spontaneity in picture taking. 

Even so the number of photographs that are available from one hundred or more years ago is relatively small; future generations of historians are likely to be spoiled for choice given the fact that these days everyone appears to be permanently recording the minutiae of their lives.

The box Brownie camera; a step towards portability.

Even as cameras became a normal part of family life, there were limits. If your family was anything like mine, the camera came out only on high days and holidays. Films were still quite expensive to buy and to have developed. Many were the times when a twenty four exposure roll of film would see us through from Christmas to the end of the summer holidays: the film would then be taken down to Boots the Chemist; a few days later we would collect the developed pictures. There was always a great sense of anticipation; half the time no one could remember exactly what was on the film anyway. We would flick through the pictures, often still none the wiser, “Who took that?”, “Where was that taken?” were questions that frequently were asked as we sorted out the ones worth keeping. Because there were always plenty of pictures that were over-exposed, or where someone’s feet, or head, had been chopped off.

The instantly recognisable Kodak Instamatic.

Then along came digital cameras, which revolutionised the family snapshot. Now it was possible to see what you had taken and to retake the ones which hadn’t come out quite as planned. It was possible to snap away with abandon and only have developed those worth printing. With digital storage media, it isn’t even necessary to print them at all, and I’m sure that there are many people who do not print their photographs.

If digital cameras were a revolution, it was as nothing compared to development of the camera phone. The first mobile phone to have a built-in camera was the Samsung SCH-V200 in 2000. It could take only twenty photos and the resolution was just 0.35-megapixels. Phones with four megapixel cameras are now old hat; Samsung produce a sixteen megapixel camera phone and the Nokia Lumia 1020 has a 41-megapixel camera.

Samsung's SCH-V200

 

The Nokia Lumia 1020: effectively a camera that can make phone calls.

Although few people habitually carry a camera, most people carry their phone most everywhere they go and the fact that these phones are capable of taking such high quality pictures means that it seems that almost no event goes unrecorded. Even in the professional photography business the camera phone is usurping the specialist camera (and cameramen); in the USA, The Chicago Sun-Times publicly sacked photographers and expects its reporters to use their iPhones to take pictures.

The camera phone will never completely supplant the dedicated camera; for example sporting events and state occasions are unlikely ever to be captured as successfully on an iPhone as with a “proper” camera and somehow I doubt that the average bride and groom would be content if their wedding photographer arrived with just his Sony Xperia.

So now we live in an age when it is rare to go anywhere, whether it is a sporting event or a show; a concert or just a trip to the local park, without seeing someone snapping away on their phone. I hold my hands up, I do it as often as the next man, but now I should inject a word of two of caution.

It occurred to me a week or so ago, while my family and I were at The Sea Life Centre on London’s South Bank, that almost without exception, all of the visitors were taking pictures of the fish, the sharks, the penguins and the turtles. Few of them seemed actually to be looking directly at the fish themselves; it was almost as though they were so absorbed with taking pictures that they could not spare the time nor attention to be able to do anything as mundane as actually look at what was in the tanks and would be content to wait until they got home to experience their visit second hand, through the pictures they had taken. It would be sad if we ended up living our lives through the screen on our mobile phones instead of experiencing it firsthand. I am not saying that we should stop taking pictures; just that we should remember that photos should be to enhance our memories, not to supplant them.

My second concern is that although we take so many more photographs most people probably print very few of them. Two hundred thousand photographs are uploaded to Facebook every minute; yes, 200,000 which is 17,280,000,000 per day! According to Yahoo! 880 BILLION photos will be taken in 2014 so no way would I advocate that every single one of them gets printed (where would we put them for a start). BUT the greater proportion of photos that get taken that are stored only in digital media, the fewer that are likely to be available to future generations.

There are a number of reasons for this. For those who store their pictures in the cloud, how secure is it? Could you end up suspended from your account and unable ever again to access your photos and other data? It has happened to people, so yes it could happen to you (or me). Cloud service providers are, just like any other company, as likely to go out of business as any other. It is not beyond the realms of possibility either that one of these companies could fall victim of some cyber attack that compromises their data, or should I say your data.

Those who shun the cloud and store their precious photos on their hard-drives cannot afford to be smug either. Hard drives fail (mine did a few years ago, leaving everything irretrievable – fortunately my photos were backed up).

And then there are people who do neither of these things and merely keep their pictures on their phones. Lose or damage that phone, upgrade it or have it stolen without backing up those photos and poof! they are gone.

Perhaps you have uploaded your pictures to Facebook, or Instagram. That’s OK isn’t it? Maybe, but will photos uploaded there be available to future generations? Maybe, but maybe not.

Keeping copies on DVD, CD-ROM or a memory stick must be foolproof, surely? Yes, in the same way as those files you stored on a three and half inch floppy disk all those ago years are. Yes, they are safe, but have you got anything on which you can read them?

One day, when your cloud service provider has gone belly up and there is nothing on which to read that CD-ROM and nowhere to plug in that memory stick, those pictures that you have printed will be so valuable. So here is a plea to all of you snapping away merrily on your phone cameras; on behalf of future generations, please print your favourite pictures and store them somewhere safe.