Ivor Baddiel takes a light hearted look at photography

If I'm being brutally honest, I don't like art, by which I don't mean to write off the entire pantheon of creative endeavour or indeed my son, who is called Art. I'm talking specifically about paintings. For some reason, and I'm prepared to acknowledge it may be because I'm a complete philistine, what is considered to be beautiful art does nothing for me. The Mona Lisa, The Water Lillies, The Sunflowers and the like all leave me unmoved. I can see they are the work of extremely talented people, but whatever deep emotion you're meant to feel simply evades me.

Show me a cracking photograph though and it's a totally different story. It's real. A moment in time captured forever with nothing to interpret because it is what it is. I may be deeply moved by it, but then again it might make me laugh. Either way, it's getting a reaction.

The appeal, I think, lies in the genuine invasion of privacy without the fear of being beaten up or arrested. If I could, I would gladly spend my life observing people. We fascinate me, but I sit on a train and have to constantly look away from others, when what I really want to do is stare at them and study them in great detail. Their beauty, their ugliness, their tics, their scars. A photograph allows me to do this like nothing else, save for a hidden CCTV camera or a two way mirror, neither of which, unfortunately, I have access to. For that reason when it comes to a great painting, what I want to see, is not the subject of the painting, but the painter. I'd love to see a photo of old Leonardo in the process of painting Mona, That, to me, would be far more exciting than the finished portrait.

I also like the inclusiveness of photography. Everyone has a camera and everyone takes pictures, even more so nowadays with the advent of digital photography. Of course, not everyone takes great photographs, but that doesn't matter. I get huge joy out of showing my snaps to people, regardless of their quality, (the snaps, not the people you understand) though the sheer numbers it is possible to take means that every once in a while you do get one that comes close to being not bad. They're more than just pictures though. They're parts of my life and, as age creeps in and the memory fades, believe you me, if they didn't exist the mists of time would obscure them for sure.

Photography is also wonderfully ephemeral. We see an awful lot of photos each day, in newspapers, magazines, posters and the like, and then they're gone, to be replaced by the next batch. And that's alright. Who needs their happiness all in one burst? Many small moments of pleasure will do me. Perhaps ultimately that's what I like most about photography. Even though it captures and freezes a moment in time, and allows you to study it, when the moment is gone, it captures the next one, and the next one. In stillness, it has a vibrancy and life to it that mirrors life itself.