Read Online Time Present and Time Past by Deirdre Madden - Free Book Online Page A

interesting.’
    â€˜It was Lucy who made me think about it,’ Fintan says, and he recounts the anecdote of her asking about the change from black-and-white photography to colour, attributing it to a change in the world itself.
    â€˜She’s a philosopher, that kid,’ Niall says, and he laughs. ‘She’s always saying things like: “Where does the past go?” ’
    For the next half-hour or so, until called to dinner, they leaf through the books and look at the photographs. Niall points out how photography started by trying to mimic painting – there are portraits, landscapes, still-lifes and nudes – just as the movies started out by trying to ape drama. There are pictures of lemons and trout, pale eggs in a blue bowl, biscuits and studies of flowers. What strikes Fintan – and he hesitates to say this to Niall, for fear of sounding foolish – is how alarmingly familiar all these things look, exactly like eggs and biscuits, fish and flowers which he might come across on any day of his life.
    Niall explains the technical side of it to Fintan as best he can: how there are several different types of colour processes, and both of them are particularly impressed with one of the earliest, Autochrome. Niall shows Fintan how it employed grains of potato starch to make blobs of colour, and how this then operated like pointillism, the tiny specks of colour interacting to give the illusion of reality.
    â€˜It’s like pixels in a digital photo, you know?’ he says. (Fintan doesn’t know.) ‘But what I can’t figure out is that it’s quite a crude system – look closely, for example, and you can see the individual specks of colour with the naked eye. You’d think then that the photos themselves would be poor quality, but they’re not, they’re amazingly sharp.’
    Fintan doesn’t agree. It is the strange combination of accuracy and a kind of softness that he finds so appealing in the Autochromes. He finds himself imagining, until Niall inadvertently pulls him up, that this is how life would have looked before the First World War. ‘It washes everything in this kind of buttery light, doesn’t it, and then we get all kind of nostalgic because we know what was ahead of these people. The whole illusion of reality is very attractive, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Yes,’ Fintan wants to cry, ‘yes it is.’ He wants to warn these people in the photographs, to save and defend them: the little boys for whom the trenches of northern France are waiting; the babies who will come of age in the first half of the twentieth century. There is an Edwardian girl with her parasol, her white muslin dress and coiled, elaborate red hair. Fintan finds he can believe in her, identify with her as he could not with the people in the black-and-white photos he had seen in the cafe some days earlier. The colour makes a difference that he could not have imagined; it is almost shocking to him.
    â€˜And isn’t it interesting,’ Niall remarks, ‘just who gets photographed? A pity, too. The bourgeoisie, the aristocrats. You only get one side of society, in the main.’
    â€˜What I like’, Fintan says, ‘is the way photographs like this stop time.’ Niall, who had been slowly turning the pages, stops and looks sideways at him in surprise.
    â€˜But they don’t,’ he says. ‘How could they? You’ll be telling me in a minute that they look real.’ Fintan says nothing, stumped as to how he might explain to his son the complex of ideas and emotions that the photographs open up for him. But Niall understands and he laughs. ‘They’re just a construct, Dad. A kind of, like, an idea of reality, not “reality” itself,’ and he hooks invisible punctuation marks in the air with his fingers. ‘How could they be?’ he asks rhetorically, before starting to turn the pages of the book