8. Where Is That Photo? A Summer of Snaps and Studio Portraits

Chapter 8: Where is that Photo? A Summer of Snaps and Studio Portraits, picks up Norah’s and Jim’s story in mid-June 1941, when he steps up his requests for a photograph ‘for keeps’. The chapter discusses the photos of Jim and Danny in Norah’s collection and introduces her correspondence with Danny, a trainee pilot in the RAF. Danny enters the story obliquely, through Jim’s suggestion that Norah meet up with his brother when the latter is on a training course in Derby. Is Jim asking Danny to check Norah out for him, to confirm that despite being a Grammar School girl, she is not ‘above his station’? The chapter ends with a focus on Norah’s studio portrait, taken in August 1941 as she leaves school and begins work. The ‘punctum’ (Barthes) of this portrait for me is the innocence and directness of her look, which is in contrast with her more glamorous and stylised 1945 polyfoto, taken with Danny’s demobilisation in mind.