- Coronation Day, Tenby -

The copperplate script in the tiled doorway spells squibbs in letters the size of a man's shoe. An archetypal Edwardian shopfront with a pair of plate glass windows and a heavy glass door, Squibbs was the kind of photography shop found in almost every British town. It had a red-and-white awning and a yellow Kodak sign. Once a beacon of promise for holiday photographs, like memories of summers long gone, its colours and meaning have faded over the years. The day I visited, Squibbs was on the verge of closing; its neon-lit interior was as lifeless as a morgue. On the red baize of the main display case were two amateur flash guns, decades old with discoloured price tags. Between them lay a shiny booklet showing a colour photograph of a woman with backlit hair. Mirrored shelving lined the glazed cabinets on the walls. A cheerful girl with a pink ribbon in her hair still smiled out from the adverts for Colour Care enlargements, but the party had ended long ago. Pallid cardboard boxes presented a variety of exposure meters and flash bulbs that would never see the light of an exposure. Perfectly good cameras in greying vinyl cases languished unused, solemn reminders of yesterday's eager promises. Spread around the shelves and walls were photographs of weddings, parties, children and babies, landscapes and sunsets and dogs. Old black-and-white photographs had given way to vibrant prints, the earliest of which had a magenta hue, while newer impersonal portraits with bubble-gum backdrops elbowed out the past.

The owner, Graham Hughes, was a kindly-faced man in his seventies who I'd known for about fifteen years. Gesturing towards the back of the shop, he told me about the darkroom he used to have and the equipment he had installed there, equipment which he had tried and failed to give away to a college. He showed me some postcards he had made from his photographs of local views. Shuffling through a dozen or so examples of a particular scene, he inspected his work from decades ago, each print slightly differing in brightness and contrast. The picture was of a wide, sandy beach under a billowing cloudy sky, dark headlands night-black in shadow under the glare of the sun, and in the middle foreground, tiny but discernible figures, a man and woman, out walking along the beach, struggling towards the light.

Graham Hughes, Coronation Day, Tenby, 1953

Stuck on the wall behind Graham was a black-and-white photocopy of a group photograph of about a hundred people gathered on the side of a hill. Thinking it would make an ideal gift for a friend of mine who collects group photos, I asked him whether I could buy a small print of this picture. He explained that it was too difficult for him to provide reprints, but took the photograph down and placed it on the counter. Photographed in bright sunshine, its details were obscured by the sooty shadows of the heavily contrasting tones. An unexceptional photograph without obvious compositional merit, the photocopy showed it at its worst. Underneath the picture, coronation day, tenby was written in biro. Graham smoothed out the slightly curled paper with the palm of his hand. 'I took that on the golf links near Shanley's.' Built in 1929, Shanley's South Beach Pavilion had a dance hall, a skating rink, an amusement arcade, a roof garden, and a cinema, which had shown the first talkie in Tenby. Graham had joined a group that tried to prevent the council demolishing the building, but it was leveled in 1981. He had taken the photograph on a half-plate camera, and still had the glass negative. He spoke wistfully about the range of tones that could be printed from the negative, and wished he could show me a proper print of the picture. 'Photography was photography in those days.'

After searching through several drawers, Graham found the glass negative in a glassine sleeve. Gently holding the brittle paper in his left hand, he pinched the edge of the glass with his finger tips and carefully slid it out of its wrapper, placing the negative face down. The photographic emulsion, an oleaginous coating of black and umber and silver, covered the negative save for a thin margin of bare glass at the selvage. We both leant closer to see the light on it from different angles, looking at what lay within the reflective surface of the emulsion. Only a partial aspect of the negative image was visible at any one time, as the light caught a facet of the picture in its silver membrane, vanishing back within its depths before another aspect surfaced.

One of the corners was cracked and held together with Sellotape. There was a long scratch running along the top, and a little piece of emulsion had been chipped off. When Graham held it up to the light, we could see that the exposure had been technically sound; it would yield a superb print. I told him that I had a flat-bed scanner, which could bring out all the nuances and details, and he offered to lend it to me. After replacing the negative in its sleeve, he rummaged in another drawer for a shallow cardboard box, into which he carefully packed the negative. I was struck by the kindness and trust that he was showing a complete stranger, and assured him that I would take great care of his glass negative and would make a high-quality print for him. All he asked was that I return the negative to him by hand. Then, following the old procedure, he took out a ledger from under the counter and passed it to me to write down my name and address. I shook his hand and left, the shop bell dinging me on my way.

Initially, I made a low-resolution scan to give me an overview. Immediately a fuller picture emerged, the amorphous crowd blossoming into an assembly of individually distinct people. The sky, cloudless blue on the day, is rendered in a uniform tone of featureless pale grey. Such is technology, the scan highlights its flaws forensically, tearing the fabric of realism's artifice. The scratch along the top appears as a vicious scar, accentuated by its proximity to a dark band in the sky, an effect caused by uneven development during the film's processing. A series of faint vertical streaks transforms Tenby's sky into a backdrop, and a nebula of blotches and circles and scratches, overlain with a constellation of black dots, swathes the grey yonder. On the grass, the chip in the emulsion pokes a white hole in the realism, interjecting antimatter into the Tuesday afternoon. Just above the cracked bottom corner, a purple stain on the grass adds alien colour, as does an inverted letter B in the top left of the sky, forming a yellow bundle of curves floating out of the frame.

Graham Hughes, Coronation Day, Tenby, 1953 (detail)

Sharply defined in the bright sunshine against the scrim of the sky, the crowd of people clustered together have a more pronounced presence than all of the other elements, which have a softer definition. The pallid midtones of the anaemic grass and blanched buildings consign these features to the periphery, while the ranks of residents, their place in the light affirmed by the black of their shadows, congregate in the epicentre, as they stare out at the camera in a spectrum from ebony to off-white and every shade of grey. The late afternoon sunshine rakes across them diagonally, leaving the pitch of their shadows trailing behind them in a celestial breeze. Depending on the light, photography's realism can be unworldly, emphatic in its notation, severe in its demarcation. To the naked eye, a shadow is a puddle whose surface can be seen through; to a camera, in strong sunlight, it's a fathomless crevasse. The shadows in the picture head off to the top right corner, where the knoll ends precipitously with a fringe of stubbly grass and nothing but blank grey. On the left-hand side of the picture, the buildings and trees ground the scene in everyday life, but the emptiness of the opposite corner is as vacant and unnerving as the horizon on the moon.

Crowning the left side of the hill, Shanley's western façade faces the afternoon sun. Running along the upper floor of the turn-of-the-century building, a row of closely spaced windows keeps watch on the events below. Further along to the left, standing slightly behind its dominant neighbour, sits a squat concrete building with a castellated roofline, its incongruity mocked by the triad of drainpipes splayed across its south-western wall. Beyond that, ablaze in the afternoon sunlight, a grand flight of white steps with lamp posts proudly ascends an embankment. Two lines of bunting flap in the breeze, their white pennants singing out in the sunshine against the wild verdancy of a mature tree in the background. Emerging in an open space between two trees, the top of the steps is flanked on the near side by an advertising hoarding, in front of which a seated figure on a bench observes the scene below. At the edge of the picture, its glass panels glistening, is a telephone box.

Gathered together that June day are the residents of Harris Street and Trafalgar Street, corralled in front of the camera for their Coronation Day photograph. By the hour of their sundial's shadows, the day's celebrations were already well underway. The costumes of two women sitting in the front on the left,...