Letting Go

My father had several jobs during his life – dairyman’s assistant, window-cleaner (stop laughing) and accounts clerk for the King George docks – but he was briefly a professional photographer. He worked in the docks during the day, took photos and wrote articles for the docks’ magazine PolaNews and took photos for weddings on Saturdays. After he died, I found the hire purchase agreement he signed for his camera equipment in 1963, and the contract that PolaNews offered him to provide words and photographs for their articles. The money he earned was the same as the money he paid for his camera, light-meter, tripod and flash gun.

My father-in-law was also a keen photographer. My mother in law said that he would have liked me to have his cameras and equipment, as I’d showed more interest than his own children. So I inherited a lot of top quality 20th century cameras from two keen photographers. Plus, Dad bought me a tiny Rollei for my eighteenth birthday and I bought myself a second-hand Olympus as soon as I started work. Rent be damned, I’d been brought up taking photos and I knew what I wanted.

Today, we took most of those cameras to a charity shop. It was a hard decision, and I almost held onto them before passing them over – it felt as if I was letting go of those two keen photographers themselves. But those cameras have been gathering dust in our attic, my father in law’s for twenty years and my father’s for two years. This charity shop – St Helena’s Hospice – asks a techie minded volunteer to look the cameras over and get them working well, then sells them on to photography students, who are still asked to train with those old cameras. I had to tell myself that Dad and Terry would prefer to have their cameras being toted around taking photos than being dusted and looked at every year or so. It was still a hard decision, but – I haven’t used my old Olympus reflex camera for years, haven’t seen rolls of film for sale anywhere recently and have boxes of printed photos that are as dusty as the cameras. Whereas my digital shots get used as screensavers, emails, headers for blog posts (I didn’t take the shot above, incidentally… bad me… thank you to Qamera, who did).

It was a hard day. The cameras joined a dozen others waiting for new owners and we drove away feeling lighter and guilty and hopeful. The Rollei B and my old Olympus are still with me, but in our new ‘clear it out’ mood, who knows how long for.

Dad let me choose the camera for my eighteenth birthday present, and we agreed on the Rollei B. He’d told me about the times when he’d visited the restricted sections in the docks, no recording equipment allowed, and had handed over his Olympus to the security guards to prove that he wouldn’t take photos. “The Rollei fitted into my jacket pocket,” he explained. “If they saw me hand over the big camera, they never suspected I had a little camera that I kept. I always looked surprised when the photos of banned areas appeared in the PolaNews, and the magazine never let on where they’d got the photos from. The guards were cross, but as I told them, ‘You had my camera in your hut while I was in there… Couldn’t have been me…’ “

So the cameras and bags and lenses and filters have gone, but I still have that drive to take photos. Some things you never let go of, and photography is a great inheritance.

With all the excitement, the second Scriptly brief got pushed to one side, but I did get around to writing it. Be surreal, they said. Not sure my idea was surreal enough, but today’s script was about a hotel stay that was definitely not of this world. It’s been fun so far; two down, twelve to go and the third brief is looking like I might end up skipping one.