Last New Year’s Eve, I was out with a friend. We had no plans, so we met at a local cinema and then wandered the long street between our houses, pausing for a drink or two in various bars and chatting to strangers doing the same. We stopped when we became hungry and shared a plate of curries and drank beer in the window of an Indian restaurant, watching the parade of partygoers outside. Then we walked to the top of the hill to watch the fireworks lighting up the sky.
It was after midnight as we strolled back but we weren’t quite ready to call it a night, and we found ourselves in a games arcade where a bunch of women were cramming into a photo booth to take a strip of black-and-white photos together. Their enthusiasm was infectious and so we waited until they were finished and did the same. I now have the strip of photos stuck on my fridge, secured under a magnet for a local plumber. In them, we are both grinning wildly at the camera, our faces squashed close, the years of friendship evident in our expressions.
When I was cleaning up my parents’ house after my dad died, I found boxes of photographs that I’d left behind when I moved out. They chronicled my teens and 20s and showed faces that I’d long forgotten. Among them was a single rectangle black-and-white frame that looked to be cut from a much-longer strip of photos. I like to imagine that, after crowding into the photo booth and posing for the shots, the three of us couldn’t afford more strips, so we cut this one up and took a panel each. In the shot, I have long hair pulled tight into a ponytail but my smile is much the same as it is now.
I don’t remember when we posed for the photo but it would probably have been on a rare night out in the city as we trekked in on the train from the outer eastern suburbs and spilled out to all the promise of the grown-up world.
I stuck this single frame next to the New Year’s Eve photos on my fridge. Two nights out, nearly 40 years apart. And a record of who I was as a young friend and of who I am now. Looking at the photos, I decided that I needed more to fill my fridge and so these became the beginning of something bigger. Now, whenever I’m out late with friends and we pass a photo booth, I drag them in so that I can add to the mini gallery of faces I love looking at each day.
There is something about the strip photos that preserves friendship for me in a way that a single photograph does not. Perhaps it is because the photographs exist as a series of changing poses that suggests evolution or complexity to a friendship, where a single image captures an isolated pose. Or perhaps it is due to being squashed together and staring up at the lens, waiting for the flash that never seems to go off when you imagine it will, and finally when it does come you’ve already given up posing so the images are more candid than any you prepare for.
Despite most of us carrying mobile phones equipped with technology that takes far better photographs than a booth does, crowding into a machine with friends to take strip photos is still a thing. I wonder if it is because there is something magical about having to wait by the booth for the strip to finish printing and pop out into the tray before we then crowd around to check if our hair looks OK or if our smile is straight. The rarity of waiting for the photos to print seems to increase the joy.
I have thousands of photographs on my phone snapped without much consideration for form or composition and I rarely look at them. But a strip photo is proof of something, it’s tangible and real. And importantly, these tiny squares don’t tell the whole picture of whatever is happening because there is no background. They aren’t an attempt at capturing an event like other photos are. These are something simpler, a reminder of a mood, a feeling, a connection between us and the people we care about. And they are a record of a moment in time that we can stick on our fridge.
• Nova Weetman is an award-winning author of books for children and young adults, including The Edge of Thirteen, winner of the Abia award 2022
