The best photos I’ve never taken

Gold medallists of the Great Britain team pose for a selfie with a member of British Airways cabin crew before flying home from Rio. Photo: Getty Images

It’s funny how life through a lens messes with our perception, Liz Breslin writes.

Hossegor, France. The World Surf League in full spin, the beach packed with barefoot disciples. Boats and divers braving the waves for close-ups. All of us following the action.

To the left of a right-hander, five nuns come walking along the wave-line. They don’t lift the dip of their habits from the swell of the waves. They glide, heads slightly inclined, towards the imperceptible screen between the watchers and the watched. The sun dances between them. It is the perfect picture.

But I never took it.

I thought about that tableau recently, though, watching the photo rounds of biker burqas and nuns on beaches, making their snapshot provocations. But I can only explain my scene. So it doesn’t compare.

It’s funny how life through a lens messes with our perception. I never took a photo of my mum doing a 180 on our trampoline (go Ma!), her face alight with fear and delight as it swung, before the rest of her, towards me. I’ll always remember the moment.

Years ago, I started taking snaps of my daughter’s lost teeth, each by each, but that soon fell by the wayside (as most organised things do in my house), and so now I have a weird mix of memories of delicious cupped hands proffering tiny teeth, and two actual pictures I took when we began the project.

From one of the photos, I can reconstruct how she’s sitting, holding out the tooth. But it’s not half as tender as the dim memories of bending down outside a half-lit bedroom, marvelling at minuscule white enamel and a raw, red, clever gap, though I don’t have any sharable visual imagery to prove that, unless you count retrospective words.

We live in world where our social media providers help us curate our memories (Liz, we care about your memories! See what you did three years ago today!).  But then visual spin-doctoring is nothing new: Choosing your good photos for the album slots or anchoring them with transparent triangular corners.

Stalin, of course, went a bit further than that: his photoshoppers were stellar at eliminating people from photos at the same time as Mr S. was making sure they were more permanently indisposed. I wonder if he had happy family snaps? Stalin! See what you did three years ago today! And these days we’re all people powerful enough to filter and change our media until we like what we see.

It’s worth bearing in mind the effects of addition, as well as taking away. Researchers, messing with our memories, showed a group of people some real childhood pics with a false balloon ride shot inserted in the mix. Half of  them then remembered this fictional ride as real. So much hot air.

Adult memories are easy to manipulate, too. But we know that, intuitively, don’t we? That’s one of the reasons we stand and point and pose to click. Like, last weekend, I took a sunrise shot through Treble Cone’s big red frame, thinking to send it to people, to share.

Actually, I rapidly snapped about 15,  because, you know, I’ll sort or delete the rest of them later. And promptly forgot and went skiing instead. And here’s where the memory thing gets more convoluted.

I remember other bits of the day more clearly than that glorious sun-strike lake-shine slice of time, presumably because I’d forgotten more than just to share. Which is what some other mind-messing researchers showed with tests on students in a museum. Got them to try to remember a certain range of exhibits, some of which they were told to photograph. The results? A lot less memory recall around the point-and-clicked pics.

But of course. Why do we need to take things in too deeply when we can just swipe back to them?

Refiling, reorganising, retouching, repressing. What effects will our curatorial abilities have on the pasts we create, the present we might miss? I click therefore I am? My selfie is my self? If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is around to photograph it, how do we know it fell?

- Liz Breslin