Not long ago I was on a train when I took the last picture with
my old SLR camera. Automatically the film started to rewind – an action that
takes up to ten seconds and gives this specific sound recognized by many of my
generation. There were a young girl and her grandfather in front of me; she looked
at my camera with a surprise gesture on her face. I looked at her thinking than
probably this was the first time she heard that sound and I wondered what was
she thinking: what is that noise for? Is
the camera broken? She kept staring at my camera waiting for the sound to
finish. Then I opened the camera and removed the film roll. Without knowing it,
I gave to that little girl a small lecture of photography history and a bit of a
technical knowledge.
The reaction of this little girl to a new sound (or noise), make
me wonder how many sounds have disappeared from our lives, some of them have just
vanished and we cannot even remember.
This is the last picture I took from that train with my SLR
camera.
Curiously, this image brings back another sound from older
generations of mine, the magnificent noise of a steam train-probably that
sounds brought the grandfather‘s girl a good bunch of memories!
