I saw a report on the news: young people, who grew up with the conveniences of digital photography, are rediscovering the old-fashioned roll of film. Clumsily I saw those youngsters fiddling with their device. ‘Occasionally you forget what you’ve shot and then you get that surprise when developing’, a young man said delightedly, and a girl spoke of ‘a certain rawness that I really like’.
I thought back to my own photography career. In 1991 housemate P. door The Telegraph sent as a correspondent to the then Soviet Union. Since I had nothing better to do, I went along, and to give my presence in Moscow some semblance of relevance, I bought a camera. An analogue, of course, because there was nothing else.
For example, I accompanied P. on his travels and took pictures of everything there was to see. Those photos were very bad, but they thought that was the case The Telegraph not very. They just printed those pictures, and they paid me for them too! Yes, those were good times for talentless freelancers.
We traveled a bit. For example, I photographed a wide variety of things and people, including a frozen waterfall in Kyrgyzstan, an abortion in a dingy clinic, the bodies covered in rubble in the town of Neftegorsk after an earthquake, and the storming of the Moscow parliament building in 1993.
I remember a visit to Ufa, the desolate capital of the republic of Bashkortostan, where everyone fell ill from the drinking water, which was chronically poisoned with dioxin by a shoddy chemical plant. I photographed a greyish but laconic Ufanese, at the tap in his Soviet kitchen, declaring with a grin, ‘I’ve been drinking dioxin all my life, and nothing bothers me.’
And those reindeer. We were in Siberia for a report on wandering reindeer that are said to be ubiquitous there. That did not go well. After a week we still hadn’t seen a reindeer. Too bad, but we had to go back. On the last night we were invited to dinner by our guide. When I walked into his bathroom to wash my hands, there, in the bathtub, was a giant dead reindeer, tongue sticking out like a cartoon. Part of him was served for supper a little later. I also took pictures of that reindeer.
“A certain rawness,” say that. I have no idea where all those pictures have gone. How I would love to see them again! Yes, nowadays I have a smartphone, with which I can take as many pictures as I want. And so do I.
But alas: they are not worth looking back at.