I sometimes had such a feeling about the color pictures in the National Geographic; they, too, pointed to a brilliant, many-colored world of the future, and away from the monochromes of the past.
But I was more deeply drawn to the photographs of the past, with their dim, delicate sepia tones – they abounded in the older family albums and in the old magazines that I once found piled in the lumber room. I was already, by 1945, very conscious of change, of how prewar life had gone irredeemably, forever. But there were still photos, photos often casually taken, that now possessed a special value, photos of summer holidays before the war, photos of friends and neighbors and relatives, caught in the sunlight of 1935 or 1938, with no shadow or premonition of what would come. It seemed to me wonderful that photographs could capture actual moments, clean cross sections, as it were, of time, fixed forever in silver.
I longed to make photos myself, to document and chronicle scenes, objects, people, places, moments, before they changed or disappeared, swallowed by the transformations of memory and time. I took one such picture of Mapesbury Road, caught in the morning sunlight of July 9, 1945, my twelfth birthday. I wished to document, to hold forever, exactly what confronted me when I opened the curtains that morning. (I still have this photo, two photos, actually, designed to form a stereo pair, as a red and green anaglyph. Now, more than half a century later, it has almost replaced the actual memory, so that if I close my eyes and try to visualize the Mapesbury Road of my boyhood, all I see is the photograph I took.)
Such documentation was, in part, forced on me by the war, the wholesale way in which seemingly permanent objects were destroyed or removed. There had been wrought iron railings, beautiful and solid, around our front garden before the war, but when I returned home in 1943, they were no longer there. I found this very disturbing, and was even driven to doubt my own memory. Had there in fact been such railings before the war, or had I, in a fanciful or poetic way, somehow invented them? Seeing photos of my younger self, posed against the railings, was a great relief, proving that the railings were really there. And then there was the giant Cricklewood clock, the clock I remembered, or seemed to remember, at least, twenty feet high, with a golden face, in Chichele Road – this, too, was gone in ‘43. There was a similar clock in Willesden Green, and I assumed that I had somehow doubled it in my mind, endowing Cricklewood, my neighborhood, with its twin. Here again, it was a great relief, years later, to see a photo of this clock, to see that I had not invented it (both the iron railings and the clock had been removed as part of the war effort, when the country was desperate for all the iron it could obtain).
It was similar with the vanished Willesden Hippodrome, if indeed it had ever existed. If I even asked, I imagined, people would say, ‘Willesden Hippodrome, indeed! What’s the boy thinking of? As if there would ever have been a hippodrome in Willesden!’ It was only when I saw an old photo that my doubts were banished, and I became confident that there was indeed once such a hippodrome, though it was bombed out of existence during the war.
I read 1984 when it came out in 1949, and found its account of the ‘memory hole’ peculiarly evocative and frightening, for it accorded with my own doubts about my memory. I think that reading this led to an increase in my own journal keeping, and photographing, and an increased need to look at testimonies of the past. This took many forms – an interest in antiquarian books and old things of every sort; in genealogy; in archaeology; and most especially in paleontology. I had been introduced to fossils as a child by Auntie Len, but now I saw them as guarantors of reality.
So I loved old photos of our neighborhood and of London. They seemed to me like an extension of my own memory and identity, helped to moor me, anchor me in space and time, as an English boy born in the 1930s, born into a London similar to that in which my parents, my uncles and aunts, had grown up, a London which would have been recognizable to Wells, Chesterton, Dickens, or Conan Doyle. I pored over old photos, local and historical ones as well as the old family ones, to see where I came from, to see who I was.
If photography was a metaphor for perception and memory and identity, it was equally a model, a microcosm, of science at work – and a particularly sweet science, since it brought chemistry and optics and perception together into a single, indivisible unity. Snapping a picture, sending it out to be developed and printed, was exciting, of course, but in a limited way. I wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way.
I was especially fascinated by the early history of photography and the chemical discoveries that had led to it: how it was first realized, as early as 1725, that silver salts darkened with light, and how Humphry Davy (with his friend Thomas Wedgwood) had made contact images of leaves and insect wings on paper or white leather soaked in silver nitrate, and photos with a camera lucida. But they were unable to fix the images they produced and could view them only in red light or candlelight, otherwise they would blacken completely. I wondered why Davy, so expert a chemist and so familiar with Scheele’s work, had failed to make use of Scheele’s observation that ammonia could ‘fix’ the images (by removing the surplus silver salt) – had he done so, he might have been seen as the father of photography, anticipating the final breakthrough in the 1830s, when Fox Talbot, Daguerre, and others were able to make permanent images, using chemicals to develop and fix them.
We lived very near my cousin Walter Alexander (it was to his flat we went when a bomb landed next door during the Blitz), and I became close to him despite the great disparity in our ages (though my first cousin, he was thirty years my senior), for he was a professional magician and photographer who retained a very playful character all his life, and loved tricks and illusions of every sort. It was Walter who first inducted me into photography, by showing me the magic of an image emerging as he developed sheets of film in his red-lit darkroom. I never tired of the wonder of this, seeing the first faint hints of an image – were they really there, or was one deceiving oneself? – grow stronger, richer, clearer, come to full life, as he tilted the film to and fro in the tray of developing fluid, until at last, fully developed, there lay a tiny, perfect facsimile of the scene.
Walter’s mother, Rose Landau, had gone to South Africa with her brothers in the 1870s, where she took photographs of mines and miners, taverns and boomtowns, in the early days of the diamond and gold rushes. It had required considerable physical strength, as well as audacity, to make such photographs at this time, for she had to lug a massive camera around with her, along with all the glass plates it might need. Rose was still alive in 1940, the only one of the firstborn uncles and aunts I ever met. Walter himself had her original camera, as well as a considerable collection of cameras and stereoscopes of his own.
In addition to an original Daguerre camera, complete with its iodizing and mercury boxes, Walter had a huge view camera, with a rising front and tilt and bellows, that took eight-by-ten-inch sheet film (he still used this, at times, for studio portraits); a stereo camera; and a beautiful little Leica, with an f⁄3.5 lens – the first 35-millimeter miniature camera I had seen. The Leica was his favorite camera when he went hiking; he preferred to use a twin-lens reflex, a Rolleiflex, for general use. He also had some trick cameras from the beginning of the century – one of these, built for detective work, looked just like a pocket watch, and took pictures on 16-millimeter film.