Yes, but who is that in the picture? Who is that lurking in the album, hanging around at the edge of the slide, checking for messages on the borders of a Facebook film? Who’s that young lad/young man/middle-aged man/older man with the brown hair/grey hair/white hair? It’s me, of course, Ian McMillan, not only the star of my own life but also a bit-part player, an extra, an unpaid intern sneaking into your life with a daft grin and an upthumb. Or a vacant look. Or with a gobful of chips.
Of course everybody is on a photograph now, wherever they are and whatever time it is, but the seaside picture is a particularly honest form of the genre because it’s here, I reckon, that we’re at our most unbuttoned. We’re spectacularly informal and, probably more than at any other time in our lives, we don’t mind being photographed. ‘Just let me get my comb-over straight first; oh, never mind, it’s too windy. Just take the bloody picture!’ I guess the exceptions to this rule are the Instagram Influencers who have to make sure that their pecs are lined up symmetrically and their cheekbones are sharpened and their buttocks are contoured perfectly before they can allow themselves to be lifted into the world’s gaze but let’s face it, they’re not like the rest of us, the ones with red sauce on our white shirts, the ones with a dog jumping up at them just at the moment the shutter clicks, the ones who haven’t closed their eyes all day but close them at the exact moment of the photograph. We are the ones who want photographic evidence that we were at the seaside so that we can look at it when we’re locked down or locked up or locked into a stopped train.
Perhaps there’s a deep history to this. When I was a child all our photograph albums, and we had many of them, were crowded with variations of the same snap: a family or a couple walking down a seafront or on a promenade or along a beach. The grins are wide and the clothes are natty and the attitude certainly isn’t that of Stalin at Yalta or a celebrity caught out without make-up. The thing that intrigued me as a lad was that on these pictures everybody was there: the mam, the dad, the kids. So who took the photo? A passing stranger? Well, I now know it was usually the work of professional beach photographers from the days when few people could afford a camera. These chaps (usually chaps) would accost you as you strolled and get you to pose and then you’d go and collect the finished prints at the end of the pier just before your trip bus or the excursion train went back.
I think I caught the very tail end of this tradition because I have a vivid memory of being about four or five years old, walking down the seafront at somewhere that may have been Colwyn Bay, and a man in a dark suit like the ones insurance men used to wear said in what I recall as a very high-pitched voice ‘Watch the birdie, folks, watch the birdie’ and I looked but there was no bird. My dad shook his head and the man’s camera clicked and he gave my dad a card and said ‘By the station front at half past five’ and my mother said ‘Do you think we should?’ and my dad, always a stickler for honesty, said ‘No, we don’t have to.’ He might even have said ‘We haven’t entered into a legally binding contract’ but I think as I got older I must have reimagined and re-remembered that section of the day.
Then, as the camera became an essential adjunct to the holiday for families who could afford them, the beach photographer disappeared and we were all put in charge of our own presents and pasts. I’m very interested, however, in the way that I have ended up on other people’s pictures.
Here I am, lounging by a wall in the wonderfully named Eyemouth near Berwick-upon-Tweed; it’s a harbour with a soul and a sky that seems freshly painted every day. I’m lounging by the wall and somebody is taking a picture of the harbour and there I am in the frame. When they look at that picture they will wonder why I’m frowning; I’m frowning because a council cleaner in a hi-vis jacket is scooping up a more or less dead gull and putting it into a black sack. I know: that would make you frown too.
Here I am at Seahouses in Northumberland; I’m about to take a lick of a huge ice cream and the heat suddenly wins its battle against the cold and a huge berg of ice cream follows the rules of gravity all over my chin and because I’m on holiday I don’t care and I’m happy to sport an ice-cream goatee. The camera clicks and I’m captured in a stranger’s history.
Here I am in Aldeburgh in Suffolk. I’m having a good time but it’s mid-afternoon and because I wake up so early this is the time of day I start to slump like a half-inflated balloon. I start to yawn and the yawn grows and grows until I am like an opera singer with the sound down. I could be a man who has gone to a fancy-dress party as the mouth of a cave. A couple who are very much in love ask someone else to take their picture and it’s just as they stand with their arms around each other that my yawn reaches its climax. I guess I’ll get a laugh at their silver wedding anniversary party when the picture is blown up to ten times its original size and displayed on the wall of the village hall where the event is happening. Of course they might have got divorced and the yawn might take on terrible significance but I hope that doesn’t happen.
And maybe, just maybe, they were the same people who took each photograph. Eyemouth, Seahouses, Aldeburgh, not following me around but just briefly occupying the same coastal space on the map so that their memories include The Frowning Man, The Ice Cream Man, The Yawning Man. Ah well, it’s a kind of fame.