The Pall Mall Treasure Trove

I wish I could remember the name of that camera shop on Pall Mall. That’s Pall Mall in the little market town of Chorley, in the north of England, not the more famous Pall Mall, in London. It’s forty years since it closed, but I can still hear the sound of the doorbell as I enter, feel the hollow ring of the place, the scent of it, see the weird photographic contraptions on the shelves: the bellows, the enlargers, the developing kits.

The guy rises to meet me, suit and tie, yellow fingers stained by the nicotine. He knew cameras, lived and breathed them, and he didn’t mind sharing his knowledge, even with the pocket-money teenager I was back then, and who could barely afford the price of film.

My father was a frequent customer. He bought only second hand equipment: cameras, developing tanks... I remember ancient box enlargers too, with fixed focal lengths and grubby lenses. It was always dusty, and smelled of the cigarettes of past owners. By the time it fell into my father’s hands, it was next to junk. But he’d bring it home with a gleam in his eye, like one who had discovered treasure, and was eager to share it. Thus equipped, through the haze of an already bygone era, we learned the rudiments of developing film. That’s no small feat when you’re living in a small semi-detached house, without the luxury of a dark-room. Needless to say, we improvised a lot.

Our rewards were few, but precious all the same – soft images that took ages to tease out, and which would all too often fade back into the paper again for want of the right amount of fixative. I couldn’t help feeling the effort taught us little, only that we needed better kit.

I swore I would have a darkroom one day, a bees-knees enlarger, and bags of space to set out those trays of sweet smelling chemicals. But then the world changed, and I didn’t need any of it. You could do it all on your computer, even on your telephone. Nowadays, I lift the ‘phone and produce effortless images in seconds, enlarge or shrink with a swipe of the finger. I can post-process, add any number of effects and have them beamed round the world for other eyes to see.

If he were still around, he’d be approaching his century now, my father. I imagine him with an iPhone in his pocket – second hand of course – but still pushing the limits of what you could do with it.

I don’t know what we were searching for back then, what rich seam of discovery we’d hoped to strike. Was it something in the images we sought? But those images were like ghosts, and hard to bring out, to materialize. Or was it more about the technology, such as ours was then, I mean it being near Victorian, in an age of rockets? Sure, that might have been the thing.

The world can be intimidating in its complexity if you think too wide and too deep about it. But if you can master one small part, you feel in some way something less than small. I feel that’s the gist of it anyway. We never produced enough images to get into the mystery of them. That was another universe altogether.

My father’s best camera was an early Russian SLR, again from the dusty, cigarette scented shelves of that shop on Pall Mall. It had no doubt been cast off by a more well-heeled amateur, who’d upgraded. The only mode it possessed was manual. There was no metering. We read the light with a hand-held selenium meter, and dialled it in on the camera, or more often we got a feel for what would work – aperture and shutter speed – and we trusted to luck.

I have some decent cameras now. But in using them, the aim, the drive hasn’t changed. It’s the same as when my father and I struggled developing film in the bathroom, half a century ago – a towel over the window and a safelight that took ages to fix up and take down again when the bathroom was required for more conventional purposes – often urgently and in the middle of timing an exposure. It’s about the exploration, the desire to understand a thing bigger than oneself, for such a thing serves as a proxy for another kind of quest, something archetypal, something transcendent, and internal.

I glimpse it now and then in the images I’m taking, and more often by chance – the camera seeing something I do not. It’s an abundance of something, call it a wordless insight. We can reject it of course, seek instead our meaning in the material world, through material things, and become ever dissatisfied slaves to it. Or we can say yes please, more of that transcendent thing, and then the world becomes at once a place of magic, and much more the worthy subject of enquiry.

Yes, it was a treasure trove my father shared, that dusty old kit from the camera shop on Pall Mall, but mostly it was his enthusiasm for the quest, and for the insight one could still pursue the transcendent through the humble and the ordinary. He knew something of the nature of things, I think, and was kind enough, to pass it on.