The Best Photograph I Never Took.

It was probably 1975, or it could have been early 1976. It was probably a Saturday. I was in Stockport walking down Wellington Road South towards the square. I had a camera loaded with black and white film. I was looking for scenes to photograph. A flâneur with a machine for seeing.

 

By coincidence, there was a bride and bridegroom walking up the hill in the opposite direction. They looked as if they had just got married and were heading towards a reception. The bride wore a white dress and the groom a dark suit. I don’t know how they came to be walking there, but behind them a line of disused a coal-staithes extended from the station and stopped short of the main road. These Victorian brick structures were coated in coal dust and the contrast with the bride’s white wedding dress was marked. I thought of taking a photograph, hesitated, and then the moment was lost.­

 

They passed me and carried on up the hill. Even today I think that if I had taken a picture, it could have been one of my ‘best’. The scene was redolent of northern industry. The coal staithes had been built to allow railway wagons to empty their loads into horse-drawn wagons beneath them. They connoted industrialisation, and a huge northern heritage now lost to globalisation. The nearby Christie's hat works is now a museum.

 

The couple were roughly my age. How have they fared in the post-industrial 21^st century? Perhaps he has spent the last twenty years driving around as a ‘white-van man’ and perhaps she works in an office looking at spreadsheets on a computer screen. Factory work was never all that great anyway. Regardless of these clichés, the non-existent photograph of their newly married selves would have gained curiosity value over the years. The coal-staithes would now appear quite archaic and the choice of walking away from a wedding might be seen as prosaic. The staithes were demolished in the 1990s and replaced by a Mc Donald’s.  

 

It is no use regretting the lost opportunity. To get the ‘right’ view I would have needed a telephoto lens, not to avoid confronting the couple, but to change the perspective so that the coal staithes loomed in the background. You have probably seen this compressed perspective effect in numerous National Geographic features. Huge moon setting behind the Eiffel Tower. Huge moon setting behind the Taj Mahal. Huge moon setting behind an oil derrick in the Gulf of Mexico. Huge sun rising behind a launch-gantry at Cape Kennedy. You get the idea.

 

If I had taken the photograph with a telephoto lens, what would the picture have looked like? I imagine that the scene would have been a medium close-up of the couple and the coal-dust encrusted brickwork of the staithes would have largely filled the background. I think that a gust of wind blew the bride’s veil up into the air for a moment, its pristine cleanliness contrasting with the century of grime behind her. Perhaps they would have been looking at each other. Perhaps one of them would have looked at something outside the frame as if contemplating the future. The image could have been read that way, even though he or she might just as easily have been watching a relative cross the road. Some of the most iconic photographs are successful because they invite us to read things into them that are not really there. To get a range of glances and expressions I would have needed a Nikon motor-drive camera to take multiple frames in a few seconds. In those days I didn’t even know such a thing existed. It would have cost more than my motorcycle.

 

The image could have been a minor classic, or not. To believe that such a picture could say anything meaningful about the lives of the people in is to believe in a tradition of documentary photography that seeks to explain life from within 24mm x 36mm frames and instances of 125^th of a second. We partly live our lives through metaphors and the young couple were starting their new lives by literally walking away from their industrial background. The documentary tradition of photography excuses its temporary intrusion in the subject’s time and space by a faintly unctuous appeal to our sense of pathos. Out of the millions of photographs that have been taken a few have come to symbolise things that we care about, even if the people depicted in them are treated as cyphers. We have become used to the industrialisation of our perception but to take a ‘meaningful’ photograph, within the ethos of documentary photography, is rather like wandering round a field of randomly scattered words until a sentence can be read in a line that is seen from one position. We might feel pride in having the wit and perseverance to find that ideal place, but the ‘heroism of vision’ is probably just vanity.