Ian McMillan: Testing times with stern lady in a photo booth

Yeah, right, Ben. Tell that to the kids gathered round the photo-booth on Sheffield station waiting noisily for the middle-aged Barnsley man behind the flimsy green curtain to decide how high he wants the stool. After all, the dialogue of light and the face has to be just so.

I needed some new pictures because I’m renewing my passport; in the old one I’m a dark-haired bloke in oval glasses as big as Jodrell Bank. The side of my mouth is curving down to one side and I look as though I’m about to burst into tears. Must be the weight of the glasses.

It’s a strange ritual, this sitting down in semi-public to have your picture taken. Lots of us go through it, and it’s the way we sneak behind the curtain that intrigues me. Everybody is photographing everybody all the time these days and putting the results in blogs and on Facebook and yet here we are hiding away on an adjustable seat.

And isn’t it interesting that a photograph is “taken”? Maybe those tribes were right: something really is taken away when you have your photograph done. Perhaps your soul really does drift away as the camera clicks. I can tell you that I felt like my soul was drifting away as I sat on that stool and a lady with a posh yet authoritative voice kept giving me orders, in the manner of the SatNav woman trying without much success to extricate you from a one-way street on a mazy estate.

She told me to take off my hat, even though I wasn’t wearing one. She told me to make sure the hair was out of my eyes, even though it was nowhere near my eyes. She told me not to smile. She told me not to open my mouth. She told me to make sure I was in the right position, and that’s why I was exasperating the kids in the outside world beyond the green curtain by messing about with the stool.

I imagined the voiceover woman really enjoying her role; maybe she’d just been rejected for a big television job the day before the recording and now, instead of sashaying down Coronation Street, she was telling reluctant sitters to take their hats off and keep their mouths shut; and boy, was she having fun.

An abstracted memory, enriched by time. These booths, a bit like confessionals or Tarot-reading places, have been part of all our lives for as long as I can remember. In shops or bus stations or railway stations they just sit and wait for you to call, like relatives in houses where the kettle is always on, just in case.

The passport photo costs you £5 these days, and you get five copies of the one shot. This may be progress of a sort but I used to enjoy it when you got four different pictures. You could see a kind of progression as you tried out varied expressions, a range of poses, and then you ended up just seeing the top of your head when you dropped something on the floor. When I was chosen as a New Face of 1982 by Harpers and Queen Magazine (I know, I know… What went wrong?) and they asked for a photograph I thought I was being rebellious by sending in one from a booth with me looking mean and moody and, I have to say, amazingly young.

I guess we’ve all, as teenagers, squeezed into a booth and pulled ridiculous faces and then howled with a mixture of laughter and horror at the results. As Ben Okri says: “The subjects of portraiture live in another dimension, alien to us.”

Indeed, especially if they’ve got their hats pulled low over their heads and they’re making rabbit ears behind their unsuspecting best mate. At least you no longer have to hang around, missing your bus or your train, to wait for them to dry. They used to come out soaking and shiny and you couldn’t pick them up for ages. Some people would call it deferred gratification but I just call it plain daft.

You’d stand for a while and you’d run out of patience. You’d pick the photos up gingerly and blow on them or waft them with the hat you didn’t wear for the photo. Eventually they’d be dry enough for you to look at, trying to shield them from your mates as they grabbed and grabbed just to get a glimpse of you, one eye open, one shut.

These days they come out dry. Ah, here’s mine. The smaller glasses. The grey hair. The mouth turning downwards. Abstracted memory, enriched by time. Not bad for a fiver.

Read Ian McMillan’s new column every saturday in the Yorkshire Post Magazine