Confessions of a part-time girl

Seen in Black and White
11:25 p.m. -- 2010-01-26

In 1973, Paul Simon sang �...and everything looks worse in black and white.� I suppose that at the time, anything that wasn�t in colour looked very dated indeed. Advance to now, though, and monochrome pictures look interesting... authoritative... exotic.

I�m currently engaged in a family history project, scanning and tidying up a mass of old photographs. I found an album full of pictures, just about spanning the 20th century, with most of its pages coming loose. Many of the photos have been pressed face-to-face for so long that they�re slightly stuck together, and must be peeled apart with great care. There are sepia pictures of imposing family patriarchs, holiday snaps of long-dead ancestors paddling in the shallows on their �cheap day return� to (I�m guessing) Margate, and uniformed heroes on their way to war.

When the photos started falling out of the album, some numbskull reattached then with small strips of Cellotape, which has bubbled and yellowed. It�s not a pretty sight. Elsewhere, loose photos have picked up an occasional crease or scratch.

And yet... this is real treasure. Even though I have no idea who half the people in the pictures are. It�s very satisfying to run the scanner, adjust the levels and pick out detail that was lost forever, as far as the naked eye was concerned. I�m bringing these photos back from the edge of extinction. I intend to produce a modern picture book, and give it to my parents. Not just because it�s a good gift idea, but also because I think it would be good to get copies of these pictures � and store them in more than one location � before some further mishap occurs. A fire, a flood or even just a burglary, and we could have been �orphaned� from our own history.

There are a few colour pictures, loosely tucked in here and there. They�re more modern, but they�re in much worse condition. As always happens, the dyes fade at different rates, leaving colour photos with an odd magenta tint. Jimi Hendrix was right: his era has a Purple Haze.

There are automatic filters to adjust the hue of a faded colour photograph, seeking out the vanishing yellows and boosting the wishy-washy blues... but to be honest, I�m not that bothered. Perhaps because I remember all those people and places, but perhaps because those pictures were too easy; too close to reality. I prefer the over-exposed, the poorly printed, and the motion blurs of children who were too excited to stay still.

There was a time when a photograph was a special thing. An expensive luxury of chemicals and glass plates. People would preen and pose for their one wedding photo. Then film came on a roll, and then in a cassette; then came Polaroids, then home video cameras... and it all got a bit too easy. The sense of a photo as a moment in time is greatly diluted, now. I�m concentrating on the older stuff. (Which has the advantage of not including photos of me, with my sticky-out ears and short trousers...)

Black and white photos are wonderful. By 1991, even Paul Simon had recanted. When he performed the song again in Central Park that August, the lyric had become �...and everything looks better in black and white.� Maybe because he�d changed his mind for artistic reasons; or maybe because Eastman Kodak had always given him so much grief about using their brand name in his song.

Never mind all the free advertising they got as a result - although if you�re my age, you probably bought Fujichrome Velvia instead... but nobody ever wrote a song about that. In 1991, Eastman Kodak was still an industrial giant. It would be another decade before digital cameras made serious inroads into their business. (They finally stopped making Kodachrome last year.)

The last rolls of film I ever shot... were Ilford 50: black and white. The film stock was ten years past its sell-by date so I doubled the exposure times and hoped for the best. I had to pay a small fortune to get it processed, but the results were gorgeous. Inky, glossy blacks that you could almost fall into, and snow white whites. (And a good thing too, since I was photographing polar bears.)

The best thing about the whole process was not knowing if the photos were going to be any good or not. Having to wait until I got back to civilisation, and then having to wait a week for the prints to come back from the lab. (You can�t get proper B&W done on the high street.) It was as if the excitement of the trip hadn�t actually ended until the photos were safely delivered. The digital ones from the same trip had been looked over, cropped, thinned out and generally buggered around with before we�d even got back to Winnipeg.

And that�s the key thing about old, old photographs. They endure in a way that our latest ones won�t.

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