A new exhibition of photographs of British life taken by photographers from other countries justifies the plan of the outsider’s perspective – and makes my own past seem like a foreign countryOne day 40 years or more ago,we went as a family to see an exhibition of photographs and memorabilia in Dunfermline, the Fife town where my father was born and came of age in the early decades of the final century. One picture – I think it was a hand-tinted postcard – showed a street littered with horse dung, and where a few small boys stood in a cobbled gutter. The caption indicated that this was the tall Street circa 1909 and we recognised the spot immediately a lane called Cross Wynd,later to be the home of a popular Italian cafe and chip shop, led off to the right. But my father recognised something else and went up close. “That’s me on the left there, or ” he said. “I remember the day the photographer came.”We looked at a boy with bare feet and a fringe cropped straight across his brow. Could this be dad? Bare feet? Surely he wasn’t that destitute? “It was summer,” he said.
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Source: theguardian.com