Let’s talk about pictures and picture albums
Pictures are a running commentary of our lives, whether spontaneous or deliberate.
MANY years ago when I was a clueless schoolboy making my way through primary school, my father travelled to our rural home with a man that we called our family photographer. The objective was to get the revered gentleman and his camera to take a picture of our paternal grandmother (my father’s mother).
Now, grandmother was a rare specimen from the old world. If someone gave her a new blanket straight from the shop, she would put it away until what she described as the smell of “Chirungu”, a strange European aroma that new blankets exuded, was gone. New dresses suffered the same fate. If you happened to have just taken a bath with deodorised soaps or even a cake of carbolic soap, she sneezed and roared like a lion in the forest. Grandmother often took long journeys on foot. If she were an Australian Aborigine woman, we might have said she went walkabout. Lotions and perfumes were, of course, taboo!
So you can imagine what her response to having a picture of herself taken would be. She was a true daughter of the soil, who loved sugar in warm water and who cooked all her meals in earthen pots.
My father thought of something ingenious. It was that time of year when the rains were falling and most peasant farmers were busy weeding their fields. So they found grandmother with her oversized hoe sitting under the shade of a tree on one of her pieces of land.
After the usual formalities: greetings, inquiries, introductions and short episodes of innocuous small talk, the camera man asked my grandmother how old she thought she was. Grandmother was probably in her late eighties at the time.
She told him she had no idea “how many years she had”. That was the cue for him to execute his master stroke.
He told her that if she looked straight at this thing that he was holding and she made sure she was perfectly still; he could tell her how old she was.
We still have the picture in our family album and it is clear that she was sceptical about the photographer’s magic. Nevertheless, we got this priceless picture of grandmother and her hoe. Everybody loves that picture.
Most people, at some point in time, called in a photographer to have fam- ily pictures taken. If you were lucky, you would be wearing a set of new clothes, usually a pair of shorts (any colour) and a fancy shirt in rainbow colours. On the streets of Bulawayo, we called this a “states shirt”.
The American dream was still alive and well, then. All good things were thought to be American. Lovely clothes and exotic foods like fish and chips and vanilla ice cream in tasty wafers.
Of course, the businesspeople had to do vigorous promotion campaigns to convince buyers that something would really be wrong if they did not buy fish and chips from time to time.
They also had to persuade us to substitute butter with margarine. Butter was then diverted to the export market and the dairy farmers were happy ever after.
If you ask me, I can vouch for the fact that everyone was keen to have a picture taken; a picture with friends and borrowed clothes. Some of these early pictures were works of art. Quite often, the camera man told you how to pose and if you had started getting adventurous with the opposite sex, you had a cheeky picture with them now and again. This kind of picture had a place of honour in the picture album that you showed to friends and in which were the prized pictures that you loved so much and spoke so affectionately about. Each picture told a story and hearing the stories could be quite a treat.
Magazines like “The African Parade”, “Zonk”, “Drum” and others usually had pages where some daring men-abouttown and starry-eyed young girls in fashionable wear stared back at readers from the pages.
If your picture was in the magazine, you made sure to buy yourself that month’s copy.
My favourite family portrait was the one taken just outside our Bulawayo City house in one of the locations, Mzilikazi Village to be precise. In it I am standing barefoot, next to my father on his left. My head is clean-shaven and my arms are by my sides.
My father is in a chair. He is in a pair of shorts, shiny shoes and knee-high woollen stockings. He has a jacket on and is wearing a clean white shirt and tie to match. He looks quite like the suave urban man of the times.
My brother with his leather scouts belt with silver buckles is to father’s right. We all look somewhat startled and grim, but who cares, the picture is a memorable piece of work.
I also like the picture of my father’s younger brother. Being the adventurous type, the guy had at some point been to Cape Town. In the picture he is young, handsome, clean-shaven and well-dressed in a grey suit and wide-brimmed hat.
That was the year after the great drought of 1947 when, almost mad from gnawing hunger, he had tried to still his hunger with a mouthful of soil. This story is a classic in the family. You must not laugh.
The situation called for desperate measures and I would not be surprised if that same year was the one in which a famished old woman from the Chivi communal lands is reputed to have cooked a small collection of stones after which she tried to create gravy with them.
I bet that if we had access to every household in the land, we would come out rich with veritable treasures in pictures. Pictures with family and friends.
Group portraits too! Every girl in a picture is a beauty and her sunny smile or enigmatic frown is a work of art. The young men too exude lots of confidence — today’s swag!
You might be wondering what all the fuss is about. In this digital age, with smart phones and selfies, the picture is the in-thing. Some people change their profile pictures on a daily basis. These pictures are usually accompanied by clever words. The revolution on Facebook is staggering. The Facebook album has replaced the usual picture albums that we were so used to and so fond of way back then. And everybody loves a good picture!
If you want to know about someone, go to their pictures. The pictures tell you a lot of things, including someone’s pastime activities and sport preferences. I was recently at Old Trafford in Manchester to watch a game between Manchester United and tricky Middlesbrough.
Before the match was over, my friends and acquaintances back home all had copies of pictures of me on the stands. I was happy to display my match day scarf. I even recorded the fans singing their praises to Jose Mourinho, the Special One.
If I could have had a picture with the man people call Ibracadabra (Zlatan Ibrahimovich) or with either Paul Pogba or Jose Mourinho, my day would have been made. The pictures are my records and evidence that I too was at Old Trafford on this particular day when in two unbelievable minutes Manchester United equalised and also wrapped up the game with about five minutes to the end of the game.
Pictures are a running commentary of our lives, whether spontaneous or deliberate. Weddings and parties are obvious subjects these days, but people even take frenzied pictures and videos at bereavements and funerals. Sometimes amateur photographers are lucky in that something momentous happens when they somehow happen to be there — in the right place and at the right time.
The eye witness picture or video is quite often the only available record of whatever newsworthy occurrence may have taken place. There is quite a bit of money to be made whenever that is the case.
So photography has an irrefutable utilitarian value. It is generally put to a lot of very good uses including promotion and publicity. Even campaigning! In recent times, photography has become an art form and successful photographers can mount exhibitions the way other visual artists do.
The social role of photographs has changed over the years. In the olden days, only those specially favoured by someone could be found with photographs of the other person. Where people were not family or related in any way, pictures spoke eloquently about the nature of the relationship between two people, especially in boy-meets-girl situations in a birds and bees scenario.
When a relationship soured, the return of photographs signified the end of the relationship. In today’s world, the surfeit of photographs is as much a cause of friction as it is one of pleasant convenience and even historical significance.