Dear LPG,

When I look back at myself and friends in pictures that were taken decades ago, I realise that they were so different to the ones we take these days.  Apart from the fact that many were black and white, and have faded over the years, the one thing that I have noticed is that before the 1960s no one ever seemed to smile. 

I would receive pictures with letters from some of my family back home which, regardless of what they were doing, would always show serious faces.  We hardly ever smiled in the pictures that accompanied the letters they would send so that we could see how seriously they were progressing with their lives.  I suppose that we all are a bit guilty of trying to portray ourselves as successful because we know that people would look at those images and draw so many conclusions about how the people in them were doing.

I, like many others, arrived in England from the West Indies in the days when producing a photograph was a relatively long-winded and expensive business.  I think that in today’s very instant world, youngsters would not have had the time to wait to see the pictures they take for granted these days.  I suspect that all the readers of this website remember when there were no mobile phones and once a picture was taken, you would have to wait for the rest of the roll to be completed before taking it off to the chemist where it would take days to be developed so that you could see the result.

Perhaps that is the reason that people felt the need to be so serious when committing their image to memory back then, although I have another theory.  Life for me and many of my friends was all about working, studying and getting on with the new improved lives that we came here to achieve, and so we made sure that the pictures we sent half way around the world, or received from distant family, showed the people featured in them to be making serious progress because if one has to be hustling and thinking of how you can make a few dollars it would follow that you would not have time to do too much smiling or, as a Jamaican would say, to ‘skin up your face’, and  we were so much more aware that whatever was on the print had to be a lasting image of who you were at the time.

The interesting thing is that I had this notion while sifting through some old pictures in deep thought during one recent lock-down day, and my wife aimed her camera at me. I am not going to share that picture but it shows me in deep thought with a frown on my face; not the nicest image of me that I have ever seen…

Rudy Morgan