FebulousFebruary 2026: The Old Photograph

Decades of photos.

All the usual suspects.

You know who you are.

Meg, Llanbrynmair

Unlearning

I see her.

Standing still.

Doing her best to be what’s expected.

She’s dressed up.

Looked at.

Measured.

Smiled at for getting it right.

Now inside…

something tightens.

Not because anything was wrong

but because she learns, right there,

that being seen means being judged.

That approval, lives out there, not in here.

The moment doesn’t break her.

It trains her. The programming begins.

She learns to watch herself.

To behave.

To perform.

To check whether she’s enough

before ever asking how she feels.

So learns to listen outward.

To cues.

To rules.

To expectations.

Her body, wise, responsive, loyal,

does what bodies do.

It adapts.

It learns when to stay quiet.

When to push on.

When to smile instead of speak.

It doesn’t forget, it’s just paying attention.

Now I look at her again.

I don’t want to fix her, or rescue her,

or tell her she should have known better.

I want to sit beside her

and say:

You didn’t lose your wisdom.

You learned to prioritise

someone else’s agenda.

We don’t need to fight anything.

We don’t need to unlearn with force.

We just change the conditions.

We listen inward.

We soften.

We trust the signals

that were always there.

This isn’t about becoming someone new.

It’s about coming back.

Now, 

this time,

she gets to lead.

Emma.

Chained 

Many years ago I was fit as and full of bravado and fun.

I rode a 500cc motorcycle and often had my girlfriend at the time as pillion, playfully roaming about the city. The Main Street was wide and full of life but less traffic then. It was a a sunny day and we had decided to head out with a vague intention of ending up somewhere doing something. I had given her the spare helmet and rode with my padlock and heavy duty security chain across my shoulder and chest, I was advised in later years that was a stupid idea in the event of an accident, but at the time that’s what bikers did. So we turned onto the Headrow probably well in excess of the speed limit, almost immediately I was ordered to stop by two coppers. I came to a standstill beside them and one of them shouted angrily ‘Alright Sonny boy are you two chained together? take your helmet off.’ I obliged and as I did his jaw dropped and his face turned to confusion then slight disbelief. ‘Umm you’re going too fast..you need to slow down and be a bit more careful..at least you put the helmet on her..ok on your way’ Sharing a smile of delight at our lucky escape off we sped.

Janet, Brighton

Marlene

When I glance, it is the dimples that arrest me beneath the shiny mischief in your eyes. The beautiful weight of your love thuds into my core. 

But those eyes remind me deeply of your wisdom. Don’t worry, live your life, see the beauty, laugh a lot. “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou beside me, singing in the wilderness” Rubaiyat. I quoted your favourite poet by your coffin. 

You would have hated those hothouse flowers. 

Your wild free spirit will never be broken in me. It’s a beautiful barrier against fools who still seek to tame a shrew.

Ali, Brighton

The Old Photograph

He’s sat on a beachfront wall. At night. In silvered jeans. Smiling beautifully crooked, a cigarette smoked. 

The photo is silent but I can hear the wild Atlantic behind him where the spinner sharks roam. This was not a visit. This became living there. 

Snapped 25 years almost to the day. A young man dreaming of his future, stuck amidst, wishing the time away and wanting the time there to never end.

It did. Years later his dreams continued to tussle with rewrites of his story there. Reliving moments, people, decisions. The flight home always looming. The one he landed back home again on and instantly regretted it the moment it took off, the moment mid Atlantic, the moment London touched the tyres. 

Take me back. 

Adam, Kent

Tom and Elsie

Once upon a time, before Artificial Intelligence depicted non-people in a landscape determined by online popularity; before Photoshop rebuilt the view, your nose, or your whole wedding into a clickbait meme….

Before watches and phones took photographs (ask your Gran) as a means of recording every mundane daily activity ( lunch!  fun with my girlie gang!  Mum’s haircut fail!!) to be shared with everyone you have ever known, via the cloud , to prove what a wonderful life you are living.

When only cameras took photos,  but the physical film had to be removed , processed and printed by experts (or Boots the Chemists)…and then, the  breathless wait to collect and unwrap them to see if any had come out well. And not, in any way, like Mum’s legendary roll of 36 underexposed pictures of her right eye. To be placed in an album or cardboard box, dated on the back (Butlins, 1964. Annette’s wedding, 1990). A store of memories, more fragile and precious than the pictures.

And even earlier, when cameras were a rare luxury, and photos  (black-and-white) were staged in expensive studios with props – pianos, toy yachts, aspidistras –  posed, serious and almost lifeless. Photos, then, were for special occasions – holidays, weddings, coming-of-age.  How magical they seemed, copying reality so accurately: “The camera never lies”. But it told its own particular truth, to be reinterpreted by every viewer.

Over the fireplace, in a cracked and faded wooden frame sit Uncle Tom and Auntie Elsie. He looks dapper. He was not; his eyes watered, and had a clubfoot in a built up shoe, but in the frame he looks kind, happy and besotted with his recent wife. She was myopic,  jamjar bottom glasses and a problematic perm, but she looks happy – and they match, just as they did in real life. They invested the time and the hard-earned money to visit a studio, to be posed and photographed in greyscale then coloured in …with the wrong colours; a ghastly green dress, hair a too-excitable auburn.  An impressionist portrait more real than reality.  But the love is exactly the right colour and it is beautiful. They smile down the decades, and we cannot fail to smile back. We remember them as they really were – Elsie’s legendary gravy, Tom’s enthusiastic  repetitions of speech. Although no gravy is visible in this photo.

I have a Tom and Elsie photo of you and me. I don’t remember who took it, or what happened to that favourite shirt. I can barely remember the feel of my arm around you. But I remember the times, the endless sun, the passion. One day, I hope someone studying lesbian histories will find it in its beautiful wooden frame and say “well, we don’t know who these two women were…friends? lovers? sisters? but we can see the love. We can see that they love, they match… they belong.” 

 Yes, we did. And that is beautiful.

Fin, age 69¾ , Eighton Banks

Out of focus

It’s an old photo—early noughties maybe.

She’s half‑hidden at the back of a group,

so when they crop her out and blow her up

she turns grainy, ghost-soft.

Still, she’s smiling.

She looks happy.

But now—

Missing since last Saturday.

Concerns for her Safety.

Her name on posters,

her face the same one from that night

A whole life reduced to an old photo,

the last time the world caught her in focus. 

Invisible since.

Naomi Smith, Whitstable

The Old Photograph,

Memories contained,

Flashes of hope and love

Colourful smiles

Laughter

Happy faces,

A modern snap,

I remember those close to me.

The Old Photograph,

Maybe in sepia tone,

Who is it?

Relatives of years gone,

Stoic postures, 

Hardened faces

Bodies built for work,

An era gone by.

The Old Photograph,

Black and white,

A lass standing on a pier,

Hair flying in the wind

She looks happy, content,

Babe in arms.

The war is over.

Memories contained.

Lauren, Christchurch, Aotearoa

Heron Road

We three stand in a photograph

creased at the corners,

A cramped city garden.

Our hair cropped close,

dykes, not gay girls.

Hands in pockets, feet planted wide,

leather and denim,

claiming space with confidence.

We did call it butch then—

and we knew we could be butch and women,

unafraid of being seen.

The photograph does not show

what came next.

The lovers who stayed,

the ones who left,

the ones we buried too early.

Now we look at it

our faces changed

by grief, by weather, by joy.

Some of us are thicker, slower, greyer.

What surprises me most

is not how much we have changed,

but how much we remain the same.

The tilt of a chin.

The defiance in the eyes.

Time has not erased us.

It has strengthened us.

It has taught our love new verbs:

to endure, to forgive,

to remember who stood where

when it mattered.

And in the photograph,

young, lit from the side,

we are still waiting

not for approval,

but for someone to look long enough

to see what was always there:

women who knew who they were,

and never needed permission

to take up space.

Kate, Ceredigion

The old photograph.

My two sisters and me. 8, 7 5 years of age. Yes, that’s our photograph. In black white, grainy with brown edges curdled up by the passage of time. Little by little as the clock ticks we grew apart. Boyfriends became husbands for them. One had children the other did not. I married to and left them. Time passes, ties loosen and those remembered childhood days recede into the tunnel of the past. Yet my brotherly love endures. Until that is, until, it became a sisterly love. 

The summer days that year of the photograph were filled with the joys of being with my girlfriend. Little like me, of age 5,  she wore a white bow in her blond hair and the prettiest of gossamer dresses.  As the summer wore on the rows of potato plants grew and outstretched their leaves toward the blue skies of memory. We would walk among them, row by row holding hands. That old photograph, such happy memories of my first love. 

School days came between us and my memory is jogged to a curious event. It is clear, vivid etched in memory. The days when cars of the very rich were invariably black, stupendously large, not a car as we know it today but a magnificent four wheeled carriage. Such a car stopped beside me. Remember this is the old photograph days. I was little, vulnerable. The door opened to reveal a portly gentleman his face deeply creased by time. He wore a top hat. He admirably suited the car. Both being vintage. This gentleman of all things pulled from his pocket, to my absolute delight a small white paper bag. In those days a child would instantly know the bag held boiled sweets. Sold loosely, and dispensed from an array of large glass jars in a “sweet” shop. I held my breath, he sat and tapped his walking stick impatiently. I didn’t step into the car (l now realise to have been a Rolls) as my mum stated never to accept anything from a stranger. I remember being terribly disappointed. l wanted those sweets  My mum had instilled in me a fear of strangers. Yet, I thought of myself as being cowardly ..

One day during those old photograph days my father brought home an old alarm clock. From this innocent beginning l was to be discovered. My life long yearning was already in place. Needless to say, l loved bright things, colours, flowers all together these “feminine” traits which were so apparent. My father called me sissy. I suppose l was. So it seemed of much and great importance to have my hair cut to as short as possible. This upset me greatly yet my father, it seemed to satisfy him a great deal. I digress, you see the alarm clock became mine. I was to contract a life threatening illness from it. It’s former owner suffered from Scarlet Fever. A very severe disease in those days. I was quickly dispatched by ambulance to an isolation ward at Nottingham City hospital. 

My recovery was long, painful and boring. That is until the day of my discovery. I simply wanted to dress as a girl. I wanted to be one. I wore my mum’s clothes. I lay for a long time in bed at home wearing her dresses. While still recovering from the illness l was brought to new level of awareness about who l was, what l was meant to be. It frightened me, yet it brought about, years later, the new me.

Yes, the old photograph. It recalls my brotherly love.

That new photograph of the three sisters replacing the old has yet to be made. There is great doubt that it ever will. 

Patricia Thompson, Nottinghamshire