Analogue film is a poignant reminder of what we’ve lost

Recently my cousin put together a remarkable archive of family photographs. There were pictures from the Twenties of my eerily young paternal grandparents: my grandfather strikingly handsome, my grandmother dark-haired and vivid, scarcely recognisable as the diminutive, white-haired, rather severe figure of my childhood.

If my grandparents were keen recorders of the fleeting moment, the habit lapsed in my parents’ generation: my childhood is recorded only in a handful of school photographs. But it began again when my son was born. I have hundreds of snapshots of him as a baby, a toddler, a toothy schoolboy. Unfiltered, sketchily lit, badly framed, each one is a poignant jolt of memory.

I still have half a dozen undeveloped rolls of film from those early years. I have no idea what might be on them, but if I don’t get around to finding out, it seems likely that someone else will, for a keen market has recently arisen on ebay and other online sites for what is known as “mystery film” – the undeveloped film of strangers.

Appropriating the memories of unknown people is not a cheap hobby – used film rolls can sell for up to £100. When the archives of the Chicago nanny and street photographer, Vivian Maier, were auctioned in 2007, the buyers found that they had unexpectedly acquired a rich hoard of masterpieces. But most mystery film offers no promise of undiscovered genius. Instead, its appeal seems to be a plangent nostalgia for an era before smartphones, when a photograph captured a fragment of real life: unmediated, unphotoshopped – a moment of time made tangible.

“All photographs testify to time’s relentless melt,”

the essayist Susan Sontag wrote in her 1977 book,

On Photography. These days, with their formidable array of professional editing features, digital photographs are pretty good at blurring, if not entirely obliterating, time’s relentless melt.

Back in the analogue day, we might briefly have bored our neighbours with our holiday slides. But today, when the social media record of youthful indiscretion can disastrously derail an adult life, the awkward lucky dip of mystery film is precious, not just as a historical record, but as a testament to lost innocence.

Here’s a holiday snap that the tourists involved might care to forget: an image of the Venice polizia locale moving in last week to inflict an £850 fine on a couple from Berlin for brewing a cup of coffee on a portable gas stove at the foot of the Rialto Bridge. The sum of £850 is only slightly less than the £970 that four Japanese students from Bologna University were charged last year for a modest meal in a Venetian restaurant. If the merchants of Venice don’t get you one way, they’ll get you another.

But tourism comes with responsibilities, as well as consumer rights. Had those Berliners raised their eyes from their coffee mugs, they might have noticed that they were not on a campsite, but in the heart of a city whose resonant beauty has always demanded an answering grace from its visitors. Decorum, you might think, should not be a matter for police enforcement. But if good manners are not learnt early and gently, then perhaps they must be acquired late and hard.