Photographs Not Taken

It's been a while since I made a book recommendation, so here's something relatively cheap, but very interesting: Photographs Not Taken : a collection of photographers' essays, edited by Will Steacy (Daylight Community Arts Foundation, 2012). It's available in various formats; I downloaded it onto my Kindle. This is a good summary of the contents:

No printed images mar this page-turning collection of anecdotes from 62 working photographers. They are men and women like Mary Ellen Mark, Andrew Moore, Laurel Nakadate, Alec Soth, Todd Hido and the late Tim Hetherington, whose cameras are practically extensions of their bodies. Editor Will Steacy asked each to describe an irresistible photo op that they let pass, however great the temptation or ingrained the habit.
   Their "mental negatives," as Steacy terms their recollections, bring up a variety of ethical questions that stem from a common predicament: whether to shoot or not – or, in Hetherington's case, whether to expose an image of the dead to the public or not.
  Linda Yablonsky, Artnet

It's an interesting idea, getting eminent photographers to describe "the ones that got away", but which live on in memory. Not least because it's a sort of apophatic definition of their photographic aims: by describing the things they have not photographed, and why, they draw a defining boundary around their working "practice". Any keen photographer will have at least a few of these: opportunities lost because of a failure of nerve or instinct; by not having a camera to hand or only the "wrong" camera; because of a humane impulse or that measure of emotional literacy known as "tact"; or even a simple desire to be in the moment, rather than at one remove from it. Any of these can cause the most experienced and determined photographer to fail to rise to the occasion, or to deliberately turn aside, leaving a lasting and vivid impression in the memory that is somehow stronger than any photograph.

For those of us who are not professional photojournalists, of course, such lost opportunities are of far less consequence, but will nonetheless have significance. Thinking about my own mental album of missing photographs quite a few do spring to mind. Many, if not most of these are actually instances of a more general regret that I did not take more photographs, however, rather than specific occasions: I wish I had more records of the friends, events, and residences of my youthful years, for example. Although I did have a camera – a Russian Fed 3 rangefinder bought for my 13th birthday – I wasn't in the habit of carrying it around, and was still firmly the sort of amateur who used a mere handful of rolls of film in a year, to be ceremonially processed into a paper wallet of prints at the local chemist. Regrettably, when I did start to carry one around, albeit casually, it was a Kodak Pocket Instamatic, a convenient but truly awful fixed-focus, single shutter-speed, fixed-aperture plastic brick that used 110-format film cartridges. I tried scanning some of those tiny negatives recently, with mixed results. I suppose, if you wanted to be positive, you could say there's an appropriately nostalgic feel to scenes from the past glimpsed through a beaded curtain of film grain.

However, thinking of those times when I did have a camera but failed or chose not to use it some vivid examples do spring to mind. There was the time walking in mid-Wales when an aeroplane appeared over a nearby hill: an ancient Dakota, I think, almost silent and flying slower and lower than I would ever have thought possible. It was painted matt black all over, and apparently without any identifying markings. We watched it pass slowly through the valley like the dark ghost of an aircraft, but only after it had gone did it occur to me I might have used the camera dangling in my hand. Sometimes the uncanny spell of a spectacle is too strong to be broken.

Then there was the time when – on the first day of a 10-day residency in Innsbruck, Austria in 2014 – a striking young woman in full riding gear came down a path towards me on a magnificent bay horse. I brought up my camera and gestured at it with that universal raised-eyebrow expression that says, "Mind if I take your photograph?". In response, though, she twisted away in the saddle, making a startlingly strange, high-pitched squealing noise that was quite unsettling, pitched somewhere between a scream and a whimper and which definitely did not mean "yes, please do". I supposed she was either mad, an alien in human form, or some photo-shy Austrian celeb I wouldn't have recognised anyway, so I quickly stepped aside as the horse cantered towards me. It takes more courage than I possess to risk getting trampled or horse-whipped just for a photo opportunity with some crazy woman on a big brown horse. They did look very fine, though, coming down that track with the hazy blue mountains and bold pine trees in the background, and I should have just taken the damned photograph.

I also think of an unusual vista that, every time I see it, I think, "I must photograph that one day", but never have and probably never will, partly because it would require more forethought and preparation than it is worth to me, and partly because a large part of its impact is the surprise and pleasure of suddenly seeing it again, usually after hours of driving, and that element of time is something that can never be present in a still photograph. If you drive into Bridport in Dorset from the east, you generally get stopped by some traffic lights at the main junction in town. As you look down the street directly ahead of you at the lights, about 1.5 miles in the distance you will see the conical bump of Colmers Hill with its distinctive crown of trees nicely framed by the receding facades of the high street. Colmers Hill is an unmistakable landmark in south Dorset, visible from almost everywhere and much photographed, but I don't think I've ever seen it recorded from this particular angle. The trouble is, you need to be in a stationary vehicle, ideally one with an elevated seating position to see it to best advantage; I suppose you could hop out and onto the roof of a regular car, or even quickly erect a stepladder in front of the traffic temporarily halted at the lights. Yeah, right; feel free. You can have that one on me.

One final one. There are some houses near where I live which are of the same vintage and design as the council houses I grew up among in the 1950s and 60s. Once sold off to private ownership, as happened in the 1980s, British ex-council houses tend to have had extensions, new windows, and even tacky stone cladding inflicted on them, and very few houses these days have not had their front gardens paved over to provide hard-standing for cars. But on one corner a couple survive in their original state, and still have front gardens which are mainly scrubby lawn, separated from the public pavement by a simple rounded concrete edging, barely an inch high. Every time I pass them I get a rush of nostalgia, recalling happy years spent playing with friends in similar front gardens, whether crouched over intense scenarios constructed with toy cars and soldiers, splashing in and out of inflatable paddling pools full of tepid water and floating blades of grass in hot summers, or in the snowy winters we had then – 1962/3 was the Big One – scraping up snow into lumpy snowmen until our gloved fingers went numb. No simple photo of these unremarkable front gardens could convey any of this, though, even to me, so when I pass by I never bother to take the camera off my shoulder. Cameras capture light superbly, but feelings are always much more elusive.