What normal looked like

In an old family album in Tanta, the photographs from the sixties are black and white, a little grey at the edges, and nobody in them looks as though they are missing anything. The people who took them did not think the world was dull. That was simply what a picture was.

Then colour prints arrived, and the old ones began to look old. Not wrong, just from somewhere else.

We do not judge a picture against the world. We judge it against the other pictures we have been looking at all day. Whatever fills our eyes for long enough becomes the reference, and reality gets measured against it, not the other way round.

For years that reference was a phone screen: small, slightly blurred, squeezed down to load quickly, often shot in bad light. We got used to it, and some of that roughness crept into what we expected the world itself to look like.

Now a new layer is arriving. Software has started to tidy things up for us. There are fewer typing errors in the messages we receive. Faces in group photographs come out smoother, skies bluer, old scanned images sharper than the paper they came from. Before long the family album itself may be restored to a clarity its own subjects never saw.

None of this will feel like a change for long. A few months of looking and the polished version becomes the ordinary one, and the original starts to look like the mistake.

What we call real is mostly what we have grown used to. We are about to grow used to something new, and we will not see it happen.