Ashley Sterne My Photograph

This is a short comic account of a photography session by Ashley Sterne, republished in The Australasian Photo-Review, June 15, 1920.  It was previously published in Tit-bits in 1919.



                                                                   My Photograph

I believe I am the only individual of the British Army who has not been photographed in uniform.  The affair is a most distressing one, and I have cursed the photographer with the Seven Curses of Creamola (which, I understand, are some of the most potent and efficacious curses known), as well as with a few of my own, in case any of the others should miss fire.

I happened in this way.  Until I was on the morning of the eve of demobilisation I had been far too busy doing some of the war to bother about being photographed, with the result that I was in danger of leaving the Army without any record of how I looked in khaki being available for the admiration of my friends.  Accordingly, I made haste to rectify this deplorable omission, and sought the address of a photographer who had been recommended to me as being sufficiently strong to stand the shock.

Amazing Rank

As I wished to show to the best advantage, and as, moreover, I could find nothing in the King’s Regulations against it, I took all the pips which I had managed to amass during a strenuous and picturesque military career, and fastened them all on one shoulder, so that while I was merely a cadet, if you looked on my right shoulder, I was at least (I calculated) an acting-unpaid-lance-brigadier-general if you looked on my left.

“I wish,” I observed to the photomonger, “to have my face and right shoulder taken.”

“Where to?” he inquired, whistling down a speaking-tube for the errand boy.

“I mean photographed,” I explained.

He appeared annoyed, and blew the errand boy back again.  “I see,” he remarked.  “You wish your face — “ and he began to look me up and down, as if he had lost something.

“If you’re looking for my face,” I said, “you’ll find it on top of my neck, just underneath my cap.  It’s that round thing, something like a melon.”

He uttered a little cri de joie as he recognised it from my vivid description.

The Camera Man at Work

“Yes,” he said, reeling back in admiration, and holding his hand over his eyes to hide his emotion, “I think I’ve got a couple of steel plates that will be able to take the strain.  Just sit down on that chair.”

I did so while the photomonger arranged a tasteful and pleasing background of thunderclouds and sea made out of painted canvas, and placed a beautiful Corinthian pillar made out of papier mache for me to rest my right ear on.  He put a rustic stile made out of rustic stile wood on the other side of me, and thrust a newspaper made out of newspaper into my hand.  Then he produced a 3 in. 20 cwt. breech-loading camera, and aimed it straight at my weasand, odds bodikins.

“Now,” said he, “just look at that newspaper as if you were reading an important despatch from Sir Douglas, asking for your advice.”

A Washout

I at once assumed one of those stern, relentless looks which are usually present on the features of all great men who have made England the great and glorious nation which she is to-day.

“That’s better!” cried the photomonger, hopefully, as I resumed my seat.  Then he slipped a dark slide into the breach of the camera, squeezed a motor-horn, took two guineas away from me, and threw me out.

                                                            *     *     *     *     *

No, the plate did not crack, nor any coarse old joke of that sort.  Nor did I spoil it by moving and producing a picture like that of a meteor rushing through space.  It was merely this:  About a week after I had been demobilised, after I had given away all my uniform, my field boots, my spurs, my pips, my revolver, my moustache, to a poor woman with six starving children, all of different shapes and sizes, that I received a curt note from the photomonger to the effect that by an oversight, for which he said he held me entirely responsible, he had omitted to put any plates into the dark slide.  Thus, as a soldier, am I lost to posterity. — Tit-bits.