I tend to be a bit resistant to the idea that just because something new has been invented, I need to have one, but I have finally succumbed and replaced my old phone with an iphone I bought from my daughter. One of the main reasons I wanted it was to be able to take photos whenever I felt like it. Specifically, I wanted to amuse myself by taking photos of the streets around my house in suburban Cambridge, when I wander them at night to walk the dogs.
It fascinates me how easily something familiar can be made strange, simply by putting a frame round it and isolating it from its surroundings. This house is just down the road from me. I pass it every day. And yet in this picture it seems (to my eyes at least) a remote and mysterious place.
Below is a takeaway that’s just round the corner, but when I showed the picture to my wife, shorn of its surroundings, she didn’t recognise it. Isolated like this, it seems to me to take on a slightly mythic quality, pregnant with possibilities and meanings. What is happening in there? Who is that man? Whose bike is that? Whose car? What is the significance of that strange name? Yet, I could walk there right now, and it would just be a very ordinary takeaway on a very ordinary street
You could say this effect is a kind of trick. By making something into a picture we confer a spurious significance on it. But I’d rather look at it the other way round. Everything is charged with meaning, with significance, with mystery. We just don’t notice it most of the time because of the corrosive effect of familiarity.