Viva La Foto

Full website and backend. Email nightmares over many, many days.

Some of these kids these days won’t even know how much of a pain in the arse taking photos used to be. Not taking them. Getting them developed, I mean. Aside from it taking forever (unless you’re a millionaire) and having to actually physically go to a place, you had to suffer the ignominy of whoever’s dealing with you being party to your entire family’s every move. We’ve all seen ‘One Hour Photo’ (if you haven’t, you should. It’s really good).

Having only ever been interested in art, design and the like at school and beyond, I’ve developed my fair share of rolls of film myself and there’s something innately pleasureable about contact sheets, chemicals and desperately not trying to drop the bag thing in the pitch dark. One time I developed a whole roll of film with nothing on it. Imagine going through all that messing about to get nothing out of it. Turns out I didn’t put it in properly so it didn’t wind on. Winding on. How archaic.

And then along came digital cameras to blow all of that out of the water. I’m assuming that all of that is now a completely lost art. I remember when I got my first digital camera in 1999. I think it was about 320×240 pixels. Spectacular.

Nowadays I tend not to take photos of anything, because I’m old. I prefer to live in the moment and actually *remember* what it is I’m doing. And, well, I think it’s all spoilt because of the neverending wave of vacuous teenagers documenting their lives to the nth degree on Instagram and suchlike. Honestly, I wish something or someone would come back and reset photography back to how it was. Then we’ll see how many pictures of your avocados on toast or your girlfriend poncing about on a beach you’ll be arsed to go to Boots to get developed. Bearing in mind you’ll be going there twice and there’ll only be about 24 photos.

I’m guessing not many.

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