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My Brownie

T. SHER SINGH

It took us years to apply simple arithmetic and work it out for ourselves that it was merely a figure of speech.

“Way back," our Grade Seven teacher, Brother Johnson, would begin his story, “when I was a young man ... er ...  you know ... just before the War … the First World War ...”

He would then scour our faces to see if any of us had clued into his exaggeration.

No one did. We merely wanted to hear the tale that followed, mesmerized by the knowledge that he was “old”, which translated into being the fount of wisdom and knowledge.

The year was 1960. Johnson was in his 30s. I was 10; my classmates only a couple of years older than me.

Not one of the 18 in our class caught the hyperbole.

Ely, my 10-year old niece, doesn’t either, when I use the line on her before rambling off into a meandering tale.

The other day, while sorting out my crates of photographs -- that alone ages me, doesn’t it? Who stores prints today anyway? -- I was reminded of Johnson’s classic preamble to his stories.

Looking at the black & whites from my childhood, it does feel today as if they are from the pre-World War I era. No matter that I was born long after World War II, even after the Partition of Punjab.

But the world has gone through so-o much change since then that it looks like we’ve lived through a whole chunk of human history. It feels like it was Sat jug (the Age of Truth) then, and Kali jug (the Age of Darkness) now.

The black & white photos sitting in front of me tell me that they were captured in simpler times when many things were still complicated. 

I can actually pin-point the year, even the date if I really wanted to, when my own world opened up to reveal new layers of experience.

The year was 1958, and I was 8. My father had just come back from a long trip abroad, and my share of the goodies included a portable Olympia typewriter, a copy of “Pears Cyclopaedia”, a stash of stamps and coins …

And a Kodak Brownie camera.

In a universe yet to be littered with gadgets, it was a little black box that created simple, unadulterated magic.

Roughly three inches by four by five, it had three eyes-and-mouth like fissures in the front, each covered with a lens; with a mini glass window on the top, and another one on the side.  

It was like a little animal that had been tamed and shaped into a cube-form. You fed it with film, pointed it at something or somebody, it would whir and blink. And then, magically, a few days later, you had an exact image of what you had seen at that given moment, in your hand.

It became my pet. I took it wherever I went, except I had to leave it home when the holidays were over and I had to head off to boarding school. Years later, when I was older, I would be able to take it to school too.

I learnt how to take care of it.

The film -- the choice was between a “120” or “620”, I remember - consisted of a roll of paper on a spool, almost three inches long and an inch in diameter. You had to load it in the back, lock the flap shut, and whirl the knob until the little counter read “1”.

Then you held the camera in front of you, hugging it chest- or waist-high, pointing it in front of you at whatever you wanted to "snap" - photograph! You could see your subject in the inch-long and ¾” wide glass window, and decide if it worked as a panoramic (horizontal) shot. If not, you flipped it on the side and looked through the other window; it gave you a portrait (vertical) view.
 
There were no lens to adjust, nothing to focus … it was an instamatic camera, which pre-dated the later instamatic inventions by decades. You simply pointed and clicked.
 
The early film-rolls allowed you to shoot 12 or 20 images. Which meant you had to plan ahead, to discern and discriminate, to pick and choose. If properly rationed, a roll lasted you for months or an entire vacation.

Once done, you removed it from the camera and dropped it off with a local “photography studio”. It took a week or two, if not more, to find out how you’d done.

Once “developed“, you were given a bunch of negatives - 2“ x 2“.  They were translucent and transparent squares of plastic-like material, showing the image in reverse. The photo-shop guy helped you choose the good ones, so that you didn’t waste your money printing the bad, “out-of-focus” ones.

Once you’d selected the good ones, the negatives would be sent off for prints. You picked them up a week or two later.

They were black and white squares.

Compared to what we have today, they were works of art … because they left a lot to the imagination.      

The time lapse between the “intent” and the “deed” and then the “consequence” or final product, was lengthy and had its life-lessons: planning, rationing, discernment, discrimination, patience, budgeting …
 
It was also an era of formality. When you were being photographed, the concept of getting ’casual’ shots had yet to be discovered. You had to pose to be photographed. People always dressed up or, at the very least, cleaned up for it, groomed themselves, preened and pruned each other endlessly.

And smiling before the camera was a “no-no”. You had to look serious, because being captured for posterity was serious business.

If sitting, you sat formally. Upright, straight posture, staring straight ahead. Hands in your lap.

If standing, you had to be erect and in military-attention, hands straight down by the sides, open and not fisted. Looking straight. And unblinking: which meant, to many, wide-eyed.

I remember when, years later, we heard rumours that colour photography had been invented. We didn't believe them. It was a gimmick, we were sure: they had figured out a way to add colour to B & W photos. And then we saw the photos appear on the walls of the photo-shop. No, they hadn’t been artificially or hand-coloured, we were assured.

New cameras, new films, were invented. The cost of developing and printing these new wonders was prohibitive, because the film had to be sent away to distant Calcutta. It took a month before you got them back.

Then, the “contact-sheet” was invented. You were given a single sheet with miniature images of all your photos -- you could shoot as many as 36 now on 35 mm rolls, if you really wanted to splurge -- and then you chose which ones you wanted printed or enlarged.

A whole new world of photography opened up. The more things you had to do with it -- aim, centre, light, measure, focus -- the better, and more expensive, was the camera! You had to do classes now in photography. There was a choice of lens and flash-guns. You could get motors and telescopes. You had to choose between films too - high-speed, low-speed, indoors, outdoors, etc.

Two more decades, and they would invent a brand new gadget: a camera that just needed to be pointed; you simply clicked, and voila! It was done!

Once the flood-gates were opened, as everything else in life, there was no stopping progress.

Sardar Sangat Singh of Malaysia will have many more and juicer recollections for you. His memory has a number of advantages over mine: while I go back to the First World War, he can remember the Boer War. On a good day, even the Crimean War!

And, he was - nay, is - a professional photographer.

My stories are but those of an amateur.   

January 29, 2013

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