Whenever I see a photograph from the 1990s, something happens to me that I find difficult to describe without sounding completely irrational. I do not simply admire the photograph, recognise its period details, or experience the pleasant melancholy that accompanies an old song. I want to get inside it. I want to put my hands against its surface, find some imperceptible weakness in the material, and climb through. I want the camera's rectangle to become a doorway into the actual afternoon on which the picture was taken. I want the air on the other side. I want to hear the sounds occurring just outside the frame. I want to turn around and find that the world continues in every direction, unconcerned with the fact that I have arrived from thirty years in its future. Most of all, I want to stay there for a little while. The comfort I seek seems to exist on the other side of time and space.
The photographs that produce this sensation are rarely famous. A much less remarkable scene usually opens the wound. A shopping centre in 1996. A family kitchen with an untidy bench. A suburban street photographed on a cloudy Tuesday. The electronics section of a department store, full of televisions showing the same broadcast at slightly different colours. A photograph taken inside a bedroom, perhaps to record somebody's new computer, with a dozen incidental objects that the person holding the camera did not think worth arranging. There might be a half-empty drink on the desk, a jacket hanging from a chair, a magazine lying open, a window through which you can see no more than the side of another house. These are the images that make me stop. They are evidence that an entire ordinary world existed, unselfconsciously, before it became a period we could only revisit.
It is the ordinariness that hurts. There is something manageable about an image of a historical event. I know that it belongs to history. I know where to place it. But a fluorescent-lit supermarket aisle from 1994 resists the dignity we impose on the past. Nothing momentous is happening. Someone is choosing a packet of biscuits. Someone else is wondering whether there is time to get home before a television programme begins. A shop assistant is tired. A child is bored. Outside, cars are passing and strangers are deciding what to have for dinner. In the photograph, all of this remains suspended at the edge of visibility. I have an almost physical urge to move the camera a few inches to the left, then to walk past it, through the entrance, out into the car park, down the road, and into an evening that has already ended.
I sometimes imagine the transition with embarrassing precision. The photograph yields like a curtain. For a second there is a sensation of resistance, as if crossing between two different temperatures, and then my shoes meet the floor. The image is no longer an image. Its grain resolves into actual surfaces. The clothes are ordinary clothes again, not costumes from a decade with a name. The fluorescent lights hum. The checkout makes its mechanical noise. A radio plays from somewhere I cannot see. Nobody notices me because nobody has any reason to suspect that an impossible thing has happened. I am just another person standing there, apparently taking an unreasonable amount of interest in the price labels. I would be overwhelmed not by the extraordinary but by the terrible, extravagant privilege of being able to look around.
Then I imagine stepping outside. I would want to see what was showing at the cinema and what was stacked in the video shop. I would want to read a newspaper still unaware of everything that had happened after its printing. I would want to listen to a conversation between strangers about an upcoming film, a new band, a local event, or something so trivial that nobody would remember it by the following morning. I would buy something inconsequential purely for the receipt, a physical record of having occupied that date. I would probably stand at a bus stop and watch traffic move past until somebody asked whether I was waiting for a particular service. I cannot think of a sufficiently convincing answer to explain why watching an ordinary road in 1996 might be the most extraordinary experience of my life.
Nostalgia plays its part. I was a child during the 1990s, and childhood has a way of changing the apparent dimensions of the world. Places are larger. Summers seem longer. Adults know the answers to questions we have not yet learnt how to ask. The future is enormous and indistinct. But I do not think childhood entirely explains what these pictures do to me. Many of the photographs I find most affecting show places I never visited and people I never knew. I can be moved by a photograph of an American shopping mall, a Japanese game shop, or an Australian suburban lounge room that has no connection to my personal history. I am homesick for a time as much as for my own memories of it, and sometimes for a time I could never have personally inhabited in the first place.
That distinction troubles me, because a photograph is not a reliable picture of a whole society. Its edges conceal as much as they reveal. A bright shopfront tells me nothing about the private anxieties of the people walking past. A smiling family does not guarantee a happy household. The attractive absence of mobile phones cannot tell me whether the people in the picture were lonely, frightened, financially insecure or simply having a dreadful day. The 1990s contained cruelty, illness, prejudice, boredom, economic strain, violence and all the familiar disappointments of being human. They were not paradise. If I could actually cross over, I would enter a world in which the people around me had problems I could not solve and futures I could not warn them about. I know all this. The knowledge does not extinguish the desire. It forces me to ask what the desire is really reaching for.
Part of the answer is that I want to experience a world that has not yet been informed of its own disappearance. The people in a photograph from 1997 do not believe they are living in the 1990s in the sense that we now understand that phrase. They are living in the present. The decade is an administrative convenience, not a museum exhibition. The style of a jacket is simply a style somebody likes. The design of a computer interface is the latest attempt to make a machine easier to use. A shop sign is not an example of lost commercial typography. The song playing on the radio may be new, irritating, magnificent or forgettable. Nobody has been told which artefacts will become symbolic of their era. The future still has permission to surprise them. They can be completely wrong about what comes next, and the consequences of that wrongness have not yet arrived.
I miss the environment in which cultural experiences arrived in recognisable containers. A computer game came in a box with art and instructions. A film had a theatrical release and then eventually appeared in a video shop. A record occupied a physical space; finding it might mean travelling to a particular store or asking somebody whether they had seen a copy. Television belonged to a schedule. Magazines arrived on their own terms, carrying news that was already a little old, and this delay did not automatically seem like a defect. I remember the expectation surrounding things that were still on their way. An advertisement could promise an experience without simultaneously offering a thousand reactions to it. An image of a mysterious game could remain mysterious because the next image was not immediately available.
The enhanced CD-ROM edition of Primus's Tales from the Punchbowl has recently brought this feeling into particularly sharp focus. It belongs to a brief period when an album might also become an explorable place. It asks the listener to navigate a bizarre digital waterworld, encountering animated oddities, sounds, fragments and diversions. There is something touching about the sheer excess of the undertaking. A band could make a record, then decide that the record ought to contain a strange little universe, and people would spend serious time trying to build that universe within the limitations of mid-1990s computers. A contemporary account describes Les Claypool wanting to make something people could spend a couple of hours wasting time inside. Imagine that as an ambition: to make an eccentric place in which someone might pleasantly lose an afternoon.
I look at screenshots from such programmes and experience a kind of double longing. I want to explore the software, certainly, but I also want the room around the computer. I want the thick monitor, the computer desk, the sleeve of the disc, the faint impatience of waiting for something to load. I want a Saturday on which this program feels technically astonishing and slightly ridiculous, when I am allowed to be unsure whether it is a game, an album, a collection of music videos or some form of interactive art that has no settled name. I want to encounter its rough edges before decades of technological development have taught me to regard them as deficiencies. The imperfect animation, the peculiar transitions, the menus that behave like miniature theatrical sets: each offers a glimpse of a future that was still being improvised.
That is the cruelty of a photograph. It proves the place existed while withholding access to it. The image offers an astonishing amount of information, yet it cannot tell me what was happening five minutes earlier or five minutes later unless somebody made another recording. It cannot show me the temperature of the room. It cannot let me ask the photographer why they chose that angle. It cannot tell me what the people in the background were thinking, what they would do the next morning, or whether the afternoon seemed worth remembering. I can enlarge the image until the pixels become enormous, but I cannot recover a single additional second of lived time. The more closely I inspect it, the more completely I become aware of being on the wrong side of the glass.
The internet has made this form of longing both easier to satisfy and more difficult to endure. I can summon thousands of pictures from the decade within seconds, many of them uploaded by strangers who have no reason to know that a particular street corner or television set might make someone on the other side of the world feel something overwhelming. A search for 1990s computer shops or suburban malls can become a tour of vanished environments. The archive seems inexhaustible. Yet every image is encountered inside the same contemporary apparatus, surrounded by suggestions, comments, advertisements and opportunities to abandon it for something else. I am looking at a quiet room from 1995 while a machine in 2026 tries to predict what I should look at next. The collision can be almost unbearable.
I have written elsewhere about the consequences of permitting networked technology to occupy so much of our attention. This essay begins at a more primitive level. It begins with a bodily wish to leave. Sometimes the thought is startlingly simple: I would like to be elsewhere, and the elsewhere is thirty years ago. I have described the present as cursed in moments when the contrast seems particularly severe. That word is excessive, of course, and deliberately so. There is no supernatural curse. There is a collection of human decisions, incentives, technologies and habits that have made the surrounding culture feel relentlessly available, relentlessly aware of itself, and frequently incapable of leaving anything alone. The word captures the emotional disproportion of living inside arrangements I no longer regard as natural, while watching photographs of a world that did not yet contain them.
I do not mean that everyone in 1996 was undistracted. Television could devour an evening. Advertising existed. Celebrity culture, sensational newspapers, commercial manipulation and every variety of shallow entertainment flourished. People were already complaining about information overload. The difference I feel is one of boundaries. A screen could occupy a room without occupying every room. A television broadcast ended. A computer was located somewhere in the house, often shared, sometimes disconnected, and usually something a person sat down to use. The internet, where available, involved a deliberate act of connection and could tie up the telephone line. These limitations could be inconvenient, and many people welcomed their removal. Looking back, I wonder whether some of that inconvenience was also a form of protection we failed to recognise until it had gone.
I want to return to the extraordinary fact that the world once stopped supplying itself to me. If I had finished a game, I could sit with the ending. If I had read a magazine from cover to cover, the magazine was finished. If I wanted to know more about an obscure artist, I might have to wait until I came across an interview or found someone who could tell me something. My ignorance was not always comfortable, but it left a space in which imagination could operate. I could wonder. The incompleteness of my knowledge belonged to the experience rather than appearing as a defect to be corrected immediately. I miss the feeling that a work of art might live with me for days without being surrounded by the opinions of strangers. I miss having a response before discovering what everybody else thought my response ought to be.
And then there is the unrecorded world. I am struck, when looking at old photographs, by how much human life escaped documentation. A birthday might produce twenty-four or thirty-six photographs, some of them blurred, some accidentally wasted. A family holiday might survive in a packet of prints or a few minutes of camcorder footage. Ordinary conversations disappeared. A joke made at a barbecue belonged to the people who heard it. An awkward moment could remain an awkward moment rather than becoming a durable item in a searchable archive. Of course, the absence of records could be painful. People lost photographs, voices, family histories and evidence of wrongdoing. Preservation matters. But the possibility of disappearing from public view also mattered. A person could have a bad afternoon and, with luck, leave it behind.
I wonder, too, whether part of my longing is for the historical future as it appeared from inside the decade. By the middle of the 1990s, so many things seemed to be arriving. Interactive entertainment, digital art, computer animation, new kinds of music, increasingly ambitious games, strange experiments in virtual spaces. The machinery was awkward but full of character. Each generation imagines its future differently, and the future imagined by that one was certainly not free of corporate fantasy or technological naivety. But there was a sense that things were taking shape in directions we had not yet named. A CD-ROM could be an encyclopaedia, a gallery, a puzzle, a virtual house, a music video collection or a baffling piece of personal expression. So much of it was impractical. That is part of its charm. The industry had not yet decided which forms of experience would be considered efficient.
There is another reason these images exert such power, and it is the one I find hardest to sit with. The people in them are younger than they are now. Some are no longer alive. A person photographed in an ordinary kitchen in 1993 might have regarded the moment as unworthy of any special attention, while somebody viewing the image today would give almost anything for one more conversation at that table. There are photographs in which the room survives but the household does not. A chair remains where someone used to sit. A child's drawing is attached to a refrigerator. The people who inhabited that arrangement dispersed, changed, aged or died, and the picture preserves them at an age to which they can never return. When I want to climb through an old photograph, I am also responding to the intolerable asymmetry of knowing that the people on the other side cannot come forward to meet me as they were.
Imagine, for a moment, that the impossible doorway actually opens. I step into a photograph dated September 1996 and remain there until the evening. There would be no great historical mission. I would not seek out a famous person, try to alter an election, purchase shares in a company whose success I already know, or attempt to turn foreknowledge into an advantage. I would want an ordinary day, made precious by the knowledge that it could never be repeated. I would walk through a department store. I would sit in a café and read the entertainment pages. I would visit a music shop and examine the new releases. I would stand outside a cinema just long enough to hear people discussing what they had seen. Perhaps I would find a computer running an improbable interactive disc and spend some time lost in its imperfect world.
At some point I would start noticing that I had become the strangest person in the room. I would know too much. A newspaper headline might make me think of events nobody there could anticipate. A passing reference to the internet might carry an almost unbearable private irony. I would recognise future celebrities before their names meant anything. There would be people I wanted to warn and others I wanted to reassure, and the ordinary rule against interfering would suddenly feel cruel. Most of all, I would have to bear the knowledge that the world around me was not actually frozen. Every person I met was moving towards a future they had no way of seeing. My imagined refuge would contain exactly the same condition that makes the present so frightening: time would be passing.
Perhaps I would return through the photograph at dusk, with the horrible instinct to delay the journey by five more minutes. I would walk slowly past a lit shop window. I would turn around to fix the arrangement of buildings in my memory. The last song on the radio would become unbearably important simply because it was the last one. Once I had crossed back, I would realise that what I had wanted to preserve was not merely a decade's atmosphere. It was the possibility of living without the foreknowledge of loss. Even inside the 1990s, I would know that the evening was ending. No journey through time could remove that knowledge from me, because I would carry myself across the threshold.
I have a family now. That fact complicates every fantasy of escape. The people I love are here, in this time, living lives that are still unfolding. My child belongs to this century, and I would not exchange the years I can spend with her for the opportunity to recover any vanished afternoon. Yet I find myself wondering what photographs of our ordinary domestic life will mean to her in the future. There will be objects in the background that I barely notice, details of the house that seem so familiar they are almost invisible, a world of advertisements, packaging, music and little routines that will one day appear unmistakably dated. Perhaps she will look at one of those photographs decades from now and feel the same strange urge to step inside, to visit an afternoon when the people she loved were younger and the future still lay open before them.
That thought changes the weight of the camera in my hand. I am no longer merely collecting evidence that my life happened. I am accidentally constructing the doorway someone else may one day wish they could use. A photograph of a child playing on the floor may also contain the last surviving view of a room as it was. A picture taken on a busy morning may preserve an expression somebody misses more than any posed portrait. The background may matter. The trivial may become priceless. I want to document enough to leave something behind without allowing the act of documentation to consume the moment it is meant to honour. There must still be room for ordinary life to occur without becoming an assignment in preservation.
This is where my hostility towards aspects of the present meets a responsibility I cannot avoid. If I really believe that the world of the 1990s offered conditions of experience worth recovering, the most meaningful response cannot be to spend the rest of my life looking backwards. It has to involve making some of those conditions possible now. A room can still have a computer that is switched off. A television can still be watched without a second screen. A game can still be approached without reading everything about it first. A piece of art can still be made with no imagined audience hovering over the artist's shoulder. I can still give my attention to somebody who is physically beside me. None of this will reopen the vanished decade. It may, however, prevent the present from becoming quite so uninhabitable.
Still, some evenings I find myself staring at another photograph. Perhaps it shows a shopping arcade at closing time. A few people are walking towards the exit. The lights of the shops have begun to look warmer against the darkening windows. A television is playing in the background, too distant for me to identify the programme. I can almost hear footsteps against the tiles. Somewhere outside there is a car park, and beyond it a whole city continuing with its business. No one imagines the place will disappear, or that the image will acquire a second life decades later in a stranger's mind.
I would give a great deal to cross that threshold for an hour. I would not ask to be younger. I would not ask to be important. I would not even ask for anything particularly enjoyable to happen. I would ask to walk among people for whom the 1990s are simply today, to hear them talk without knowing they are speaking from the past, to feel the peculiar relief of being somewhere that has not yet been absorbed into a record. I would ask to spend a little time inside a world that still has all its ordinary tomorrows. When the hour was over, I would return. There are people waiting for me here, and there is a life I want to continue making with them.
The desire would remain. I doubt it will ever entirely leave me. There will always be another photograph, another room, another street, another arrangement of light that seems to contain a promise the present has somehow misplaced. I know I am asking a flat image to do something no image can do. I know that the room beyond it contained disappointment as well as beauty, and that the comfort I imagine there is inseparable from the distance that makes it unreachable. But I also know that the longing is telling me something true about my relationship with time. I want life to feel local again. I want ordinary moments to have edges. I want a future capable of arriving without first being explained to me. I want the people I love to have the freedom to be where they are, without the whole world forever pressing against the glass.
Perhaps that is why the simplest photographs are still the hardest to look at. They show human beings going about the business of living, surrounded by things they do not know are disappearing. The camera has saved a little light from an afternoon. Everything else has moved on. I stand outside the frame, thirty years too late, and feel the absurd impulse to reach towards it. Just once, I think. Let me through. Let me hear the room. Let me see what happened after the shutter closed. Let me inhabit the afternoon for no reason except that it was there. And then let me come back, carrying whatever I can learn about how to live more fully in the time that remains mine.
