I didn’t apply for a job at my local one-hour photo lab out of a noble desire to serve the community’s photographic needs. I wanted a part-time job to fund my full-time uni lifestyle – specifically, the kind of money that turned into festival tickets, Dr Martens and Poppy King lipstick.
Rabbit Photo was a mini-lab wedged into the corner of the Westfield Figtree shopping centre like a forgotten Tetris piece. On Thursday nights and Saturday mornings, I’d slip on my white cotton gloves and take my place behind the counter, ready to accept canisters of Fuji film.
It was 1993, a decade before digital cameras invaded every pocket. Film was expensive so people saved it for big occasions, not brunch. You aimed, pressed the button and hoped you hadn’t cut the birthday kid’s head off. Customers dropped off their small, rattling time capsules – 24 or 36 exposures – and ticked boxes on an envelope: matt if you were arty, glossy if you were everyone else. There were no previews, no filters and no deletions.
Technically, a lot of the photos were terrible. Entire packets of blurry toddlers running through sprinklers. Holiday snaps where everyone’s faces had been bleached by the flash, pupils glowing demonic red.
But from my vantage point, life in my midsized town unspooled. Wedding receptions in function centres with tulle-wrapped pergolas. First-day-of-school shots with uniforms a size too big and Band-Aids on skinned knees.
Back yard barbecues, caravans permanently parked on front lawns, lounge rooms with red velvet sofas and porcelain figurine collections. It was the pre-Instagram highlight reel: the parts of life people thought were worth spending money on.
And then there were the photos no one really wanted anyone to see.
This was years before cameraphones and dating apps democratised the dick pic, yet people were still determined to immortalise their genitals on 35mm and hand them over at the counter like dry-cleaning. The preferred genre was the “from above” shot: a sternum-to-zipper composition, as though they’d applied selfie-angle advice to the least photogenic subject available. It was a crash course in the full diversity of the human penis.
There were women, too: in lacy underwear on unmade beds, standing nude in front of mantels, leaning against doorframes in the soft-focus confidence of being in love.
Rabbit Photo had an official protocol for these: NFR, which apparently stood for “not for Rabbit”, but I was never entirely sure. On any packet containing explicit photos, we’d write NFR in thick black Texta so we wouldn’t perform the standard move of opening the envelope at the counter and flashing the top print at the customer to confirm the order. It was a small act of mercy, sparing everyone the moment of making eye contact with one another and with the customer’s naked girlfriend in a Santa hat.
Behind the counter, the mechanics were their own special stress. We didn’t have a darkroom, just a black nylon sack with armholes. To change film I would kneel on the cold tiles, shove my arms inside and, by touch alone, crack open the canister, unspool the film and thread it on to a reel. I’d sweat, worried I’d fumble, let light in and erase someone’s only photos of nan’s 80th.
When the negatives were developed, they had to be cut. The negative cutter was a guillotine pretending to be office equipment. You had to press the handle at exactly the right speed and angle. Too fast and you’d slice through someone’s honeymoon kiss; too slow and the blade would chew the film into a jagged ruin.
One day a woman approached the counter holding a single photograph. I recognised her immediately: a former teacher from my high school. In the picture she was standing beside another familiar woman – my old English teacher. Back at school, their relationship had been the subject of whispered rumours. By the time she turned up at Rabbit Photo, her partner had died of breast cancer.
She laid the photo gently on the counter and showed it to my colleague. “I’m looking for a frame for this,” she said quietly. My colleague glanced at the picture, scanned the wall of frames, realised we didn’t have the right size, shrugged and walked away.
The teacher stood there for a moment, holding the photograph. After a few seconds, she slid the photo back into her handbag and left. I watched it happen. I didn’t call her back, didn’t say, “Let’s see what we can work out”, didn’t even manage a clumsy, “I’m sorry she’s gone.” That small silence has stayed with me far longer than any mangled negative.
Rabbit Photo didn’t give me a lightning-bolt epiphany or a glamorous career pivot. It gave me calloused feet, a working knowledge of photo chemistry, an unexpectedly comprehensive understanding of local penises and a lasting sense that the most ordinary jobs can be where you learn how to really look at people. For $7 an hour, that turned out to be a pretty decent deal.
