The Shadow Friend

by Alex North

It wasn’t the ones with me in them that caught my eye so much as the older photographs: images so faded it was like the paper they were printed on was forgetting them.

I’m old enough to remember taking a cheap, plastic camera on family holidays and then having to wait a couple of days for my reel of snaps to be developed at the local shop. Most of them would be blurry, of course, and the ones that weren’t have faded with age. But I do have a real fondness for old photographs, and they have a way of working themselves into my fiction. I think it comes down to my preoccupation with how the past affects the present. A physical photograph – taken and developed at the time; picked up and viewed now – is a tangible connection between the two. In light of modern technology, there’s a tendency to look back on the whole process as old-fashioned, quaint and impractical – and of course in many ways it is. But the handful of photographs I have from my childhood are still there, faded as they are, while the thousands of digital photographs I’ve taken since – as vivid as they might be, and as easy and convenient as they were to take – are scattered over the hard drives of various outdated devices I probably couldn’t charge if I wanted to. In a similar way, a few of the stories I wrote as a little kid still exist on paper, as I used an actual physical typewriter to write them, and the ink and paper remain. As I got older, I used rudimentary word processing software on old computers, and then saved the files on floppy disks. Remember them? Honestly, paper might get old and tired, but if I wanted to read any of those later stories now then I’d probably need to steal the hardware to do so from a museum.