The day nobody photographs

What's wrong with photographing the ordinary anyway?

I missed it, you know. Since this edition is being released on a Wednesday, I entirely missed Tuesday. Well, in terms of picking up a camera and taking a picture.

Pic: Kelly Sikkema

Tuesdays are a strange affair, aren’t they? They’re rarely sung about, bar Ruby Tuesday by the Stones. I can’t think of a film, or a specific book, although there is that scene from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

At the beginning of the story, the character Arthur Dent wakes to find his house about to be bulldozed to make way for a hyperspace bypass or something, and he learns this from his friend, who turns out to be an alien. Given that, and faced with this rather inconvenient start to an otherwise normal day, he reflects that he never could get the hang of Tuesdays.

I wrote that celebrating my memory and the wonderful link with the day nobody photographs or particularly celebrates, but only when I fact-checked my work did it turn out that the storyline was on a Thursday.

Douglas Adams wrote Thursdays, but I’ve always thought Tuesday was the more neglected day. Thursday at least gets to stand next to Friday. Tuesday has no such advantage. It is the no-man’s land of days.

But it’s with Tuesday in mind that I’ve written this piece, to go out on a Wednesday.

We, photographers, spend our lives trying to predict which pictures will matter, and I think we’re spectacularly bad at it.

We stand in front of a magnificent landscape and implore that, “This is the one.” We wait for the perfect light, the perfect cloud, maybe even the perfect person to walk into the frame for scale. We adjust the settings, check the edges, make one last tiny correction and press the shutter with the satisfaction that we’ve captured something important, but not convinced we have.

Then there are the more normal types of pictures you make, thinking they’re art classics. You line the shot up of a still-life on the kitchen top at home, comparing it in your mind to one of Edward Weston’s studies of peppers. Only you take it, and at that moment, the first word that comes to your mind is mehhr.

Oh, and let’s not forget the photograph you took of a family moment that just sang to you of being like the work of one Emmet Gowin, who photographed his wife Edith, her family and domestic life over many years. His work was considered serious art. The extraordinary came from the ordinary, only when you look at your classic Emmet moment, the ordinary seems to have become even more ordinary.

But what if it really is/was a good photograph?

Maybe not at the time, but give it twenty years, and then it’s a whole different story, in a literal sense. Because that’s where photography becomes interesting. It’s maturing like a fine Italian cheese.

The pictures we think will define our lives often become just another file in a folder, and instead, another photo begins to whisper.

This is the one you nearly deleted.

Your son sitting on the kitchen floor, surrounded by cereal he’d accidentally tipped everywhere. He’s sat in an island of Coco Pops!

Your partner reading the newspaper with a cup of tea going cold beside them, or perhaps a book from an author they particularly adore. The one you look for every birthday.

Your dad tightening a hinge on the garden gate, because you never learned how to.

Nothing dramatic happened that day, but if someone had asked you what you’d done, you might say, “Oh, not much.”

Yet, years later, that picture carries an extraordinary weight.

Why?

Because the photograph isn’t really about the person anymore. It’s about the world they inhabited. That’s why old family albums can be so magical. We tell ourselves we’re looking at our grandparents, but often our eyes drift elsewhere. We notice the wallpaper, classic china ducks on a wall, the old electric fire, the pattern on the curtains, the television that once seemed impossibly modern.

Someone has accidentally photographed an entire era!

But no historian set out to preserve that kitchen and no museum thought to catalogue those mugs or those chairs or the lino on the floor. But there they are, surviving because someone wanted a picture of Auntie Daphne on her birthday.

The background becomes this incredibly potent story.

So perhaps, here’s a thought, perhaps, perhaps, we’re all looking for the wrong photographs?

Social media has trained us to believe photographs should be extraordinary. We chase mountains, sunsets, famous streets and dramatic weather. We scroll through endless perfection until ordinary life begins to feel slightly disappointing.

But ordinary life is where that life actually happens.

Most of our existence isn’t spent standing on a cliff at sunrise unless you really do work for National Geo, it’s spent waiting for the kettle to boil, or getting frustrated looking for the car keys, again, for the third time in a week. It’s walking the dog and unloading the dishwasher, not at the same time, clearly.

While we’re living these moments, they feel entirely forgettable, obviously. Only later do they become precious, and I suspect that’s because memory is selective, but photography isn’t.

Memory edits.

Photography records.

Your memory may tell you your childhood home was remarkably modern and cool. Then you find an old photograph and realise the wallpaper was hideous and the sofa looked like something rescued from a skip. Your dream world is not so dreamy.

But your photography, if you had the foresight to borrow a camera early on, was telling the truth all along, and that’s the more interesting bit.

…and while I’m on one, as they say, there’s another photographic thought that bothers me.

Photographers, us lot, well, we often disappear from our own stories.

We’re the ones holding the camera while everyone else gathers together.

We arrange people, tidy clothes, tell someone to move slightly left, then step back and make the picture. Years later, we discover that we documented everyone else’s life beautifully while leaving surprisingly little evidence that we were there at all.

The family history is complete, except for the person who bloody recorded it. I’d say the occasional selfie isn’t vanity after all. Perhaps it’s simply leaving proof that you occupied your own life.

And then there are the photographs that never existed.

Every photographer can list them. I bet if you and I sat down for an evening, we’d be able to find a good few.

The face seen through a train window at Paddington, you were drawn to but didn’t dare lift your camera for. Or more personally, the dog, waiting by the front door ten minutes before anyone arrives home, the family gathered around the kitchen while Christmas dinner was being readied, and that brief moment when everybody was under the same roof, and nobody realised how unusual that would one day become.

Perhaps that is why I still enjoy walking with a camera: the act of putting one foot in front of the other slows the world down.

I begin to notice things that speed hides from me, like a bicycle that’s clearly been leaning against the same wall for years, and the chalk drawing outside a school gate that tomorrow’s rain will wash away.

These aren’t remarkable discoveries; they’re simply evidence that life is carrying on. And maybe photography, at its best, isn’t about seeing, it’s, as the saying goes, about paying attention.

Those are different things.

Most of us look all day long, but very few of us truly notice.

So here’s the thought I’ve been left with. Standby, give me a timp roll.

Maybe, just maybe, we’re asking the wrong question when we pick up a camera.

Instead of wondering whether a photograph will impress anyone else, perhaps we should ask whether it might one day help someone remember. Not remember a holiday, not remember a famous landmark, because they’re the obvious point your camera at stuff, examples.

I’m suggesting you just remember, say, Tuesday.

The kitchen pan cupboard that never closed properly, the homemade hat stand with a slight lean, and the chair that sadly nobody sits in anymore.

The truth is, we never know which picture will become the important one. We simply don’t decide that; that’s a decision for time. We think we’re photographing people, but often we’re photographing a disappearing world. A collection of ordinary details that, unnoticed today, will one day become priceless.

So if you pick up your camera this week, don’t worry too much about finding the spectacular, really DO photograph the ordinary, because the extraordinary already knows it’s extraordinary.

It’s Tuesday that needs saving. Tuesday.