A Different View with Dave O’Connell
The photograph that defines my childhood is a black and white portrait of a small boy in grey suit – short pants – a Communion rosette and reluctant smile, with one hand holding a prayer book and the other resting on a side table, as you do.
It wasn’t even taken on the day of my First Communion – we had to do the suit and shirt thing all over again and drive into town to go upstairs at Farrell’s Photography in Woodquay where the moment was re-enacted for the purpose of posterity.
The reluctant smile was down to a young boy’s discomfort in a suit – something that actually hasn’t become any easier with time – and perhaps the absence of a tooth or two as well.
And of course photographic studios still exist in all of their glory – these days the photographers can also set up temporary home with the addition of nothing more than a bright light and a bed sheet as the backdrop.
But today’s portraits are less rigid, more joyous affairs; it’s more natural now and less like you were about to be shot down the barrel of a gun instead of through a harmless camera lens.
It wasn’t just my childhood; go into anyone’s home and the pictures of their youth are posed in studios with various backdrops and props like the little table on which to rest your hand.
Go back a generation or two and the formal portrait would centre on the patriarch in a big chair with his wife and children positioned around him like bees around honey.
Children were dressed in sailor suits even if they’d never seen the sea; father’s thumbed their braces to give them the air of enormous wealth
Wedding pictures are still of the more formal variety – bride and groom in one shot by the river or under a tree; bride, groom, bridesmaids and best man; bride’s family; groom’s family and group shot once everyone can be persuaded to come out of the bar for a minute.
But even then, more couples want a photographer to capture the spontaneous moments of the day – the side glance from the blushing bride, the mother of the bride fixing her hat, the father of the bride before his sixth pint.
Concentrating on the more informal aspects of the big day can have its perils too of course – my own wedding video concentrated so such an extent on the females in the church that it had to be sent back for reediting so that I could be seen in at least one frame to prove I had actually been one half of the happy couple.
Now that everyone has their own camera, the big occasions are captured for real, as they happen, not rigidly restaged later in the artificial setting of a photographer’s studio.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
