The copperplate script in the tiled doorway spellssquibbs in letters the size of a man’s shoe. An archetypal Edwardian shopfront with a pair of plate glass windows and a heavy glass door, Squibbs was the kind of photography shop found in almost every British town. It had a red-and-white awning and a yellow Kodak sign. Once a beacon of promise for holiday photographs, like memories of summers long gone, its colours and meaning have faded over the years. The day I visited, Squibbs was on the verge of closing; its neon-lit interior was as lifeless as a morgue. On the red baize of the main display case were two amateur flash guns, decades old with discoloured price tags. Between them lay a shiny booklet showing a colour photograph of a woman with backlit hair. Mirrored shelving lined the glazed cabinets on the walls. A cheerful girl with a pink ribbon in her hair still smiled out from the adverts for Colour Care enlargements, but the party had ended long ago. Pallid cardboard boxes presented a variety of exposure meters and flash bulbs that would never see the light of an exposure. Perfectly good cameras in greying vinyl cases languished unused, solemn reminders of yesterday’s eager promises. Spread around the shelves and walls were photographs of weddings, parties, children and babies, landscapes and sunsets and dogs. Old black-and-white photographs had given way to vibrant prints, the earliest of which had a magenta hue, while newer impersonal portraits with bubble-gum backdrops elbowed out the past.
The owner, Graham Hughes, was a kindly-faced man in his seventies who I’d known for about fifteen years. Gesturing towards the back of the shop, he told me about the darkroom he used to have and the equipment he had installed there, equipment which he had tried and failed to give away to a college. He showed me some postcards he had made from his photographs of local views. Shuffling through a dozen or so examples of a particular scene, he inspected his work from decades ago, each print slightly differing in brightness and contrast. The picture was of a wide, sandy beach under a billowing cloudy sky, dark headlands night-black in shadow under the glare of the sun, and in the middle foreground, tiny but discernible figures, a man and woman, out walking along the beach, struggling towards the light.
Graha
