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. I am not, however, myself a nostalgic — though we all sometimes dabble. The lemon drizzle cake tasted like Sunday at my grandparents, yes, but it tasted just as much of a Thursday afternoon at the Camera Museum. This is also true of photographs.
This is all to preface my response to the Camera Museum, which I can honestly say is one of the best museums I have so far visited. On paying the £3 entry fee (paid to the man in the camera repair shop at the back of the café), you head downstairs into the museum proper. As might be expected, the physical history of the camera is represented across the walls and glass cabinets and displays. The large concertinaed nineteenth-century models reduce and develop into the more portable, the more easily manufactured; the photography trade expands outward from the professional middle classes to any family with enough to afford a Kodak. You are surrounded by black plastic, leather, old lenses that last captured a scene over a century ago. Some of the displays are jarring to move between, such as the buzz wire game in the shape of a hand (I managed it on my third try), in the same room as the last photo of John Lennon, Mark Chapman in frame. But it is this kind of strange, lucky dip nature that makes the museum so entertaining. Follow on into the next room and you’re steeped into a tiny cinema showing – on my visit at least – Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid.
Not nostalgia, but remembrance, which is what the act of photography always is. The eclectic surfaces of the museum are not an effort in sentimentalism, though they do call upon – reminisce over – a time when technology required texture. Grooves, plastic casing, cylinders, the ridge and rise of buttons. The whole last century of both flagrant mass production, and long-lasting equipment. Many of the cameras at the museum arrived as donations from deceased amateur photographers, cameras that were used for half a lifetime or more. I find it hard to believe our smartphones will be saved by grandchildren, nor our photographs salvaged from the cloud.
After watching Chaplin, I caught sight of the handheld VHS camcorders on display. And just as with the lemon drizzle cake, I was delivered back to my grandparents’ house, where in the early 2000s my grandad often carried his Sony and its viewfinder like a cheap grey microscope. I stood there for a while, trying to recall how many summers he must have saved via that lens, and how his photographs have come to colour so much of my own memory. But of course, each generation and visitor will arrive at the museum to find themselves elsewhere. Those older than me might well dismiss the advent of digital photography all together, looking instead to the Kodak Brownies. Those a decade younger will treat it all as history. Which of course it all is.
Connor Harrison is a freelance journalist who has written for LA Review of Books, Literary Review of Canada and Evergreen Review, among others