Seven Nearly Identical Photos Of A Jacket Potato

I Go With The "Less Terrible" Option

I remember back when you couldn’t see a photo right after taking it.

You pressed the camera shutter. Something happened inside the camera. You moved on with your life and had to trust the process.

Whether the photo was good, whether anyone had their eyes open, whether your thumb was partially over the lens.

All good questions that wouldn’t be answered for seven to fourteen days.

This was how photography worked.

The ritual was specific. Exciting and anxious at the same time.

Twenty four exposures per roll. Sometimes thirty six if you were feeling ambitious or had an upcoming holiday.

You used them carefully because each one cost money and there was no checking afterwards to see if the photo had come out properly.

You pointed the camera. You pressed the shutter. You moved on.

At the end of the roll you rewound the film, which made a satisfying mechanical sound that meant you’d done something real.

You took the little canister to Boots.

You filled out a small envelope with your name and address, popped the canister inside and handed it over to a person who accepted it without any particular interest.

Then you waited.

During the seven to fourteen waiting days the photos existed somewhere between the moment of pressing the shutter and the moment of collection, in a state that was neither good nor bad.

There was absolutely nothing you could do about it either way.

In retrospect, this was probably the most relaxed we’ve ever been about anything.

The collection date arrived.

You opened the envelope in the car park outside Boots, or sometimes on the bus home if you couldn’t wait, or if you were incredibly patient, until you got home. Most people I knew never waited until they got home, including me.

Twenty four small prints. Slightly glossy. Smelling faintly of chemicals.

Most of them were wrong in some way.

Blurred. Dark. Someone had moved at the critical moment.

An entire roll from a birthday party where every single photo had caught people mid-blink, like the camera had specifically waited for the worst possible fraction of a second before firing.

You looked through them anyway. All of them. Carefully.

And then you put the good ones, typically three, maybe four, occasionally as many as six if it had been a good roll, into an album, or a shoebox, or a drawer, where they stayed for twenty years until someone found them and couldn’t identify half the people in them.

Including, in one case, me.

I’m in the photo. I know I’m in the photo, not because I recognise myself, because someone wrote my name on the back.

I have zero memory of that person.

Now I take a photo and see it immediately.

Then I take it again because the first one wasn’t quite right. Then again because I blinked.

Then four more times until I have seven versions of the same moment and have to choose between them, which takes longer than the moment itself took to happen.

The criteria for choosing is completely arbitrary.

Marginally better light. Slightly less unfortunate expression. A vague feeling that this one is the one, which is indistinguishable from just wanting it to be over.

I go with the “less terrible” option

It’s fine.

I feel nothing in particular about it.

The thing I didn’t understand then, and only worked out recently, is that the waiting was the point.

Seven to fourteen days.

Without being judged. Without being retaken or filtered or immediately deleted because the angle was slightly wrong.

Just a moment, preserved somewhere, that you’d get to see eventually.

You couldn’t improve it. You couldn’t undo it. It was already done and somewhere in a small chemical process it was becoming real without you.

That’s not how anything works anymore.

I’m not sure I’m better off.

Though I do have seven nearly identical photos of a jacket potato, so.