For something like twenty years, I have been sending films to a cheery outfit (their garish envelopes used to greet you at every airport) called DoublePrint, and they have always come back to me, regular as clockwork, with prints in two sizes: one to fit a regular album, and the other half the size, for sending to friends, thus making those tiresome negatives, which I always throw away, unnecessary.
Completely unnecessary, it turned out when, out of the blue, someone saw some of the snapshots I had been taking to pass the time while my husband was photographing bench ends and architraves, and decided they were worth exhibiting, which is what happened next thanks to that wonderful photographer and friend, Jonathan Lovekin, who scanned them for me, and the friends in both London and Rome who helped to pin them up.
But it will never happen again. The last two films that I sent to DoublePrint have just been returned. The firm has gone out of business. Like handkerchiefs, now a luxury item, and typewriter ribbons, which it takes detective work to locate, non-digital cameras are a thing of the past. The firm which served those of us who still prefer ‘film cameras’, so long and so faithfully, couldn’t keep up with the times. So, before I plod up the high street to Happy Snaps or down it to Boots, here are a few of the photos they printed which didn’t find a place either in the Holloway Road or in the via Flaminia.
BACK ROOM OF A PUB
GOLDFISH
COUNTER IN A WELSH BAKERY
ON THE BEACH
IN OUR GARDEN
Sic transit DoublePrint . . .