“Back in my day …”

I’m interested in nostalgia, as a visual concept for photography. I live in an area of regional suburbia which was developed in the 1960s. A lot of my neighbours were alive in the 1960s. There’s a tension here between the past and the present. Of times long ago versus times to come. Change is inevitable but strongly resisted. We’re like that, it seems. Us humans. We don’t take to change so well. That phrase, oft repeated of “Back in my day …” is rapidly becoming obselete because frankly, there is no real comparison to be made if one is dishing out advice on how to live.

But so much of the cultural landscape that grew in my own psyche comes from the eras in which I grew up. The colours and palette of an Australian summer in the 1970s and 80s. There was a carefree quality to my childhood as I roamed free in a world which was not so connected by technology. Now, I wonder how I survived without my damned smart phone … but once upon a time I was roaming about the suburbs with a few coins for a payphone “in case of emergency”. For my generation, “Back in my day” is also becoming obselete in terms of advising younger generations on how to live.

Whilst I can see that the “how we used to live” decades ago has been eroded away and holds no currency in the present … I do believe, quite passionately, that we need to remember. We need to preserve some semblance of recollection of how things were—both the good and the bad. Because I do not deny that nostalgia for my generation casts shadows over a lot that needed to change in our society. But, there are things I feel we have lost that held deep and abiding value or values. Primarily a sense of a life lived untethered to, dominated by, or enslaved by all that social media has brought, in the negative sense. A sense of self that is derived through time alone, without the noise of the world clammering, clammering…

A sense of self identity created by oneself, not through the variety of lenses, literally, that social media has brought. The ease with which we carve ourselves up into slices of two dimensional, staged images that are shared, constantly in public or private … I find I worry for how this will impact society in the long run.

I am part of the last generation that will remember the time before the internet, before social media, before artificial intelligence. This feels important. I don’t yet know what to do with this. So today, I just let myself play with the camera, and try to think about how “Back in my day” has a photographic look and feel to it.