Vic Mortelmans wrote: > No family members or photographers inspired me. For me, the > most important photographs are pieces of memory. How people > were, how the city was looking. I'm very intrigued by > pictures of decennia old; times I cannot remember anymore, or > times I even wasn't born yet. Once you start contemplating > such pictures, it will reveal a lot about the lifestyle of > the people photographed, the social environment of the city > at these days, and even the role of the photographer, it will > reveal about the youth of people you didn't know by then > (parents, e.g.). I hope that once my pictures may serve this > purpose, at least for myself and maybe for more.
Even in the three decades I have taken photographs, it isn't just the physical change of the surroundings that are recorded, it's the social change in society that is captured too. I compared two scenes I took recently on a main local shopping road, one in 1994 and one in 2004 and the first obvious thing was that in the earlier shot, a good half of folk on the street were smoking; it's unusual to see more than one or two in a similar scene today. > One more thought I'd like to link to this, is that nowadays > many more pictures are taken with the digital camera's than > before with the box camera's. Everyone is shooting everyone. > But very little pictures remain. Half a centry ago, it was > common to take an 'official' picture of people being > together: a meeting of a club, a family at sea, the boy with > his girlfriend at home,... Then the people were appearantly > very conscious about the 'historical' purpose of photography. > Nowadays, this is far less common, although at every > occasion, almost everyone is carrying some kind of camera, > but none of the pictures will 'remain'. 50 years ago was so different; 1955 saw the introduction of the second television channel (a commercial one) and viewing hours were limited and you paid full attention to a programme shown, a world away from most homes today which have multi-channel 24 hour 'living wallpaper' which people see in passing. The same is true in photography where today the quantity of capture from 'phone cameras to P&S digital has diluted the effect of the image, as to make the image itself almost disposable, like much of the consumer products available today. Malcolm
