My First Photo
Whilst embarking on a large personal archive project I came across this little photo stuck between two books on my shelf.
Whilst definitely not the first photograph I ever took, it is certainly the first photo I remember taking. On holiday with my parents a helicopter circled to land on the beach as part of a coast guard rescue. I remember running to get closer, lifting the viewfinder of my Kodak 'Instamatic' to my eye, seeing how far away it all looked, and then running closer again.
Obviously in that pre-digital age it was weeks before I got the photo back and realised that technically, it was pretty shit. I was disappointed that despite my running I'd still got nowhere close enough to reproduce the image that was in my head. At the time I didn't understand why my camera made everything look so far away. Oblivious as I was to the design compromises that had been made to make it possible for anyone, even a child, to render a reasonably good picture most of the time.
Although it never served its purpose as the news worthy photograph my childhood brain thought it might, it now functions as a delightful nostalgic artefact. Although the subject is far off, the entire image blurry and the physical paper is somewhat weathered at the corners, its physical appearance is much like the memory that surrounds the making of it: I don’t know how accurate that really is. Did the helicopter land? Are those people on the line of the surf waiting for an air lift or just watching it fly past too?
The photograph is not in an album so has been removed from the narrative that surrounded it. As I start to scan and organise this archive I'm beginning to think that trying to present anything in it as a story is less important than simply creating the collection. People will bring their own stories to what they find or I will discover new narratives as the collection slowly comes together.
For anyone interested this is the model of camera I was using. This isn’t the actual camera, as far as I know. This one is in the window of the Royal Photographic Society in Bristol, and I always like to stop and look at it as I pass.