Wistfully hunting Laura Ashley wallpaper.
The nostalgia time bomb in documentary family photography.
I blinked, and now I have a teenager and a tween who might as well be one, so my own childhood is going back a while now. My childhood family photos are a mix of Polaroids, packs of 36 prints, and albums with pages that used to be sticky. As a teen, I remember taking my own photos on a point and shoot from Boots. I photographed my bedroom, my cat and other things that felt important to me (it’s mostly photos of the cat).
My bedroom was encased in floral Laura Ashley wallpaper; blue cornflowers, red poppies, green leaves and was there yellow too? Does the perpetual pull of primary colours take me back to the walls that cocooned me as I grew into myself? The print was pretty big and bold. It matched the green dado rails and probably not much else. The rest of the house was an eclectic mix of antiques, and things that might have been fashionable in or before the seventies and eighties.
When we look back, it’s hard to pin down when things were current.
Was the wallpaper already looking a bit out of date? When will dark blue walls stop feeling current today? Are hanging plants still in? Rose gold geometric things? I think brass pineapples have been and gone? Going back 30 (ok 40) years, I have no idea if floral Laura Ashley was still fashionable. I suspect not, based on insider knowledge of my childhood, but who knows? Had you asked my mother if she felt our walls were “photo shoot location suitable” she’d hardy have agreed, or even less likely, cared. Today, those walls are absolutely retro, and that would be the case regardless of them being a bit dated at the time.
Current doesn’t last long. Retro lasts forever.
When I imagine that wallpaper it makes me feel something. It takes me back - away from the present into the past. The visual signpost to childhood is a nostalgia time bomb. There’s emotional weight to that. It’s possibly why I’ve wistfully googled the detail of that wallpaper a few times, in the hope of seeing the print again, if not actually wishing to try and stick it to the wall. I’d happily frame an A4 size cut of it, possibly for the downstairs toilet. It would go with the dark blue wall.
I get the feels too when I see retro cereal boxes, the boxy tv, the weird shaped car, Fisher Price toys and oh the clothes! I don’t want my childhood photos to look like they could have been taken today. I want to feel the time between the moment I’m looking at, and the moment of the looking, to be present in the act of recalling a memory. It’s in that very gap that meaning floods in.
I don’t want the photos I make today to feel “classic” or “timeless”. I want them to feel like real life, right here, right now. I want them to date.
Bring on the retro feels when my grown up kids look at themselves in front of Kallax shelves, that rug, and the French Connection sofa everyone else seems to have too. I don’t want to sanitise the setting of moments of childhood by tidying up too much. Clutter is context. Including modern day stuff in photos will absolutely give your kids the nostalgia time bomb effect, and at the time when they’re old enough to fully appreciate it too.
So, take photos at home, let go of caring whether your walls are precisely up to date, and embrace the inevitable retro effect of the genuine backdrop to your children’s childhood. You never know what visual delights they might cling onto later in life. And if you come across any retro wallpaper with cornflowers and poppies, please get in touch.