4 ms·
People were not walking with cameras like they are now. A camera was a big object and you had to buy film for it.
by AlbertCory 4y ago
People were not walking with cameras like they are now. A camera was a big object and you had to buy film for it.
- WalterBright 4y agoI would walk around with a camera many times before iphones. I still didn't take pictures of ordinary street life, because it seemed completely uninteresting. My parents were also amateur photographers, and rarely took street pictures. I had a camera in college, but rarely took pictures of ordinary things. When I look at the pictures I took, it seems they are of all the wrong things.
- ghaff 4y agoIn a lot of cities and city neighborhoods it would be fascinating to have a "StreetView" of at least more interesting neighborhoods over time. But, as you say, even with relatively cheap B&W film, that would still have cost a fair bit of money and time and very few people systematically did such things. In a somewhat similar vein, I unearthed a book a long ago company did in the 80s called "A Year in Development" which had all these photos and random detail about what was going on during a year--with a mostly engineering slant. Especially at the time, that sort of quotidian detail was rarely documented at all.
- AlbertCory 4y agoYeah. A photograph was expensive in terms of your time (and money). Especially if it meant you had to change the film. So many lost opportunities. When I was writing [1] I absolutely could not find any photos of the golf place, which is now gone. You'd think the family would have some (I'm sure they do), but they completely ghosted me. No one from the old 'hood has any. [1] https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/no-compliments-at-the-miniature-golf https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/no-compliments-at-the-mi...