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Jayne Dawson: They don't miss a click
What would you do if your wedding photographs turned out to be a real dog's breakfast, I mean really, really quite hilariously bad?
Would you smile through the tears, wish the photographer a thousand slow deaths, and then put the album at the top of the wardrobe only to be brought out to give people a giggle at Christmas?
Or would you restage the entire event: the hair, the make-up, the flowers, the carriage, the bridesmaids, the church, for the sole purpose of getting a set of snaps where you didn't look like the Bride of Dracula tying the knot with Godzilla?
Marc and Sylvia Day, of Wakefield, faced this dilemma recently and they went for the restage option, pausing only to first successfully sue the original photographer for making them look a right couple of eejits – headless eejits in some of the photographs – and then they climbed grimly back into their outfits and gave it a whirl one more time.
Would you have done the same? It's a tricky one, isn't it? Well not for me, obviously, I know what I would have done.
Let me give you a clue. That dream where you suddenly realise you're walking down the street and you've forgotten to put on your clothes? I've had a variation on that where I've suddenly realised I'm wearing my old, yellowing wedding dress... truly I have, and if you think you know what deep psychological disturbance that sig-nifies, please keep it to yourself.
(Actually, I was never totally convinced by that dress, in fact I know I should have asked the woman over the road to run me up a copy of that other one I'd seen in the posh shop window instead, so I'm going with that as the explanation.)
Over
But even if I'd loved my dress more than life itself, even if I hadn't looked like a lace curtain billowing my way down the aisle, even if I could have afforded a re-run, I could never have climbed back into it because once it's over, it's over, is my view.
Looking at photographs of a staged reconstruction would have never been the same. They wouldn't have reminded me of the day, with all its highs and lows, including that hour I spent locked outside my parents house in my full regalia until they bothered to turn up with a bloomin' key.
So I would have made do with a few snaps gathered from guests instead, or just put up with the rubbish ones.
Perfect photographs seem more important now though, and the increasing number of photographs taken is one of the defining changes of modern life.
Once, only the big occasions were for recording, the rest was just the humdrum stuff, not worthy of the family camera.
It's different now. Here's a little example of how different: recently, I was driving to Ikea with my daughter when I got myself into a knot on that new roundabout.
Circling it for the second time, I asked Daughter to please concentrate and give a bit of help with the lanes to a mother in difficulty – but she couldn't because she was fully occupied taking a picture of herself on her phone at the time.
She's not abnormal, not really, not that much. People do that all the time now, don't they? Take pictures. Randomly. Anywhere, anytime.
I'm not sure what I think. Certainly it's a useful tool for a mother trying to keep track of her offspring. Ten minutes on Facebook and you pretty much know who, what, where, when, why and how – plus you've seen the pic.
And the journalist in me likes the idea of recording everyday life, because it can get pretty boring looking at thirty years of Christmas and birthday pics with nothing inbetween, can't it?
But I do wonder how it will go with Generation Click. Will they still be taking photographs of their every move when a typical day involves a morning at the hospital followed by a senior citizens' pub lunch? Will they still be posting pictures on Facebook when the only time they raise a glass is to chase down a blood pressure tablet or the only reason they hug their partner is to lift them out of that low chair?
I'm thinking probably not , but then I've only got my mother's example to go by, and she has stopped taking any photographs on the basis that she has enough to last her now, and in any case she much prefers to absorb something in the moment. Plus, she never did learn how to grin for the camera and only ever manages to look shocked.
Generation Click might go this way too but I'm not sure, because everybody knows how to perform for the camera now, and everybody knows that if you haven't got a perfect picture of it, it didn't really happen.
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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