The 1/250th Reckoning

The perplexity of all those photographs that mean so much

You’re unsure what to call it: your studio, your office, your workspace. Definitely not your den.

You decide on office, although you could just as much call it Lucy’s room.

On the walls you have seventeen photographs. Mostly dogs, a few family.

Right next to where you sit — where you write, think, drink coffee, talk to people on the other side of the world — is a photograph of your father by the bank of the Cam.

DB., the mid-80s.

Today would have been his 88th.

The thing about photographs is that they are loaded. There’s an entire world caught in the 1/250th of a second that the shutter is open — not just what’s visible, but everything that surrounds it, everything that came before and after, the whole gravitational field of a life pressing against that thin slice of light.

You can sense it even as you lower a camera sometimes. How others — people not yet born — might one day look at a photograph and begin their own reckoning.

After all, a photograph is never just a photograph. It’s a question that keeps being asked.

So: when was this one taken?

Mid 80s.

Where?

Cambridge. Beside the Cam. Without a doubt.

Except — and this is the thing — the doubt arrives the moment you say it. In the very act of writing the words, certainty dissolves.

Is this really the Cam?

You can’t say unequivocally that it is. You know your father liked to sit by the river; you know this is exactly the kind of place you can imagine him sitting, but you don’t know it’s the Cam for sure.

99% of the time you remember taking every photograph you’ve ever taken.

But you don’t remember taking this specific photograph, though it has your eye all over it. Subject slightly right of centre. His eye hitting the rule of thirds. The composition of someone who has always seen the world this way.

And the look on his face. That’s unmistakable — the one you recognise as the one he gave you from childhood through to the very last week of his life.

Still, it isn’t proof.

What you can see with certainty:

A particular style of sandal, manufactured in the 80s, sold in England and Germany.

A haircut not unlike those worn by other middle-aged financiers of the era.

The river — how clear it was, how low.

Here is what you cannot say:

What he was thinking.

What he said when you lowered the camera.

Whether this is Cambridge at all, or somewhere else entirely, some afternoon you’ve misremembered into the wrong city, the wrong light.

There’s no one left to ask. That’s the particular cruelty of it. Every version of the story you piece together, you piece together alone.

And yet.

You can almost hear his voice — warm, well-spoken.

You can almost predict the exact words he spoke as this moment captured on film ended. You’ve been almost there, with this photograph, more times than you can count.

Yet you never quite arrive.

On Photography

That’s the thing about photographs: they promise a destination and deliver only a direction. You look, and the looking opens into more looking, and the questions multiply rather than resolve. A journey with no fixed end. Which is probably right. Which is probably, in some way you’re still working out, the point.

There’s a weight to photographing the people you love that you only fully understand later. In the act of taking the picture, you’re beginning a story you won’t live to finish. Because after you’re gone, and after the subject is gone, someone else will find it — in a drawer, in a box, in a folder on a hard drive — and start the whole thing over again. Only they’ll ask their own questions, and only ever almost arrive.

Then again, maybe they’ll look at it briefly, find nothing they recognise, and let it go. Consign it to trash and then back to dust — which is where everything comes from, and where everything returns.

In the mean time, the photograph holds its ground. Patient, loaded, slippery.

The entire world clenched tightly in 1/250th of a second.

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☕ ☕ This week’s My Photographic Life was fueled by 2 shots of espresso and a slobbery kiss from my basset hound Lucy. If you’d like to fuel next week’s caffeine intake, you can drop a tip here.