Immortal pictures, a sugared lid, and the mysteries of creation
With Connor Harrison and Faiqa Mansab
My mother is currently trying to pack all of my grandma’s possessions into cardboard boxes ahead of a house move in a couple of months. It’s getting quite overwhelming, she tells me; it’s remarkable how many trinkets a woman can collect over 60-something years.
There was a short delay in the clear-up when a few dusty photo albums emerged from the back of a cupboard, chronicling family life through the 90s and early 2000s. Birthday parties where I look like a boy, my uncles with messy teenaged hair gelled into sharp spikes defying the pull of gravity, people looking younger than you ever thought possible.
The albums come to an abrupt halt around my eighth birthday, 2006, when I guess my family started using camera phones — or perhaps I just wasn’t interesting enough to photograph anymore. There’s one lone album recording the events of 2010, when I was gifted a digital camera and insisted on printing out most of the 200-odd photos I could fit on the tiny memory card. The years of memories since are scattered across various old phones, memory sticks, and the elusive Cloud.
I’ve always loved leafing through those albums, so a couple of years ago I invested in a film camera in an attempt to get back that practice of photographing memories with the intention of some kind of permanency. There’s something special about knowing that once you’ve snapped a camera photo, there’s no going back — a sense of giving the moment immortality that the 30 photos I take on my phone to get the right angle are missing.
Perhaps, like Connor's visit to the Camera Museum that he writes about today, it just makes me think of personal histories — and the histories yet to be made. I’ve been printing each roll out and storing the photos in a box under the bed, and now there’s an empty scrapbook ready to be filled. Maybe one day I’ll flick through it and wonder how I ever looked so young.
Sadia Nowshin
Junior Editor
Saving summers and a lemon drizzle
Connor Harrison tries to resist the pull of nostalgia at the Camera Museum
It is almost too easy now to criticise the smooth-faced abstraction of the ultra-digital life. Perhaps I have AI on my mind, with its ability to skim read internet geography at great cost and produce nameless and nightmare images; arguably the least tactile output our species has so far managed. But visiting a place like the Camera Museum reminds you just how faceless modern image production has become. Take iPhones, a design largely imitated by its competitors so that we all carry the same black slips of 5G. They are not objects memory can easily attach to, though they perform a hundred and more of our daily tasks – including the capture of photographs.
Standing practically in the shadow of the British Museum, the Camera Museum is the former’s opposite in most regards. It presents to the street as a small, unassuming café for the tourists (which of course, it partly is), while the museum itself is hidden on the floor below. Immediately on stepping in off the street, though, the tactile 20th century came clicking and snapping around me. Somewhere between an older relative’s front room and a collector’s cabinet, the café has a handful of tables and chairs and settees, half of which were filled on my afternoon visit. I sat at a table in the corner, and admired the décor to the sound of Erik Satie. Jigsaw-ed over the walls were framed photographs of the famous – a close-up of Mick Jagger’s face, Muhammed Ali photographed taking a photograph – beside blackboard menus and mounted camera models. The barista came over with my order before running off to charm a family of Americans. I took a sip of my coffee – a no frills, slightly bitter cappuccino – and spooned up a mouthful of lemon drizzle, served warm with cream and a sugared lid. The coffee, though good, was lost under the sweet, childhood-reminiscent taste of the cake.
An important biographical note might be that I am a child of the late 90s and early aughts. I recall the family computer and its designated space in the living room, sans Wi-Fi. My first personal music device was a shoddy silver MP3 player the shape of a pill. You could brush the static from our TV screen like moult from a cat. Those around my age are now reaching their nostalgia years, separated enough from childhood to deem it lost.
Connor Harrison is a freelance journalist who has written for LA Review of Books, Literary Review of Canada and Evergreen Review, among others
The worst sinners
An extract from Faiqa Mansab's The Sufi Storyteller
Despite the traffic and the radio in the cab, it was difficult to hold back the tidal wave of memories. She could almost smell the sharp turpentine and the linseed oil paints of Khayyam’s studio, which had been swarming with people eager to tell him how much they admired his work and keen to chat with him about art and in doing so let him know how cultured they were compared to others. Because it wasn’t about identity but identity in comparison to others. Someone made an inane remark about a painting, and he answered mechanically in the enigmatic parlance expected from artists, about inspiration, artistic temperament, and the mysteries of creation.
He’d followed her as she went around the studio standing before each painting for long moments while he had expatiated on technique and subject. Both of them not much older than the young art students thronging the studio.
One of them had asked her own mother tentatively, “Mama…er, is it okay if we wave to those girls?”
Her eyes were on the young prostitutes across the street. It was a daring act for an over-protected young girl that would make her feel good about herself because she’d have given the gift of acknowledgement to a fallen woman. Layla didn’t hear what the mother said but couldn’t help thinking that his use of this neighbourhood as backdrop was rather clever. After all, he owed his mystique in a large part to it.
Then Layla had asked him, gesturing towards the sexworkers, “How old do you think those girls are?”
He’d shrugged and answered, “Teenagers mostly.”
“They look older.”
“It’s because they’ve seen too much.”
“Haven’t we all?”
“How old are you exactly?” he’d mocked, grinning.
“Older than I look,” she’d parried. She’d said almost as an afterthought, “I’ll take one painting. I can afford one.”
She’d taken much more than the painting.
Given back quite a bit too…
They’d watched in silence as one of the prostitutes disappeared through a door with a middle-aged man who wore his guilt lightly and his desperation far too openly.
The Sufi Storyteller was published in April 2025
The tradition of Sufi Storytelling
Faiqa joined Boundless Junior Editor Sadia Nowshin on the latest episode of the podcast to talk more about the beauty of Sufi stories, how classic Western literature might have been inspired by the tradition, and the love and pain of mother-child relationships.
Listen on Apple Podcasts / Spotify