A job that changed me: At the one-hour photo lab, customers were determined to immortalise their genitals on 35mm

I didn’t apply for a job at my local one-hour photo lab out of a noble desire to serve the community’s photographic needs. I wanted a part-time job to fund my full-time uni lifestyle , specifically, the kind of money that turned into festival tickets, Dr Martens and Poppy King lipstick.

Rabbit Photo was a mini-lab wedged into the corner of the Westfield Figtree shopping centre like a forgotten Tetris piece. On Thursday nights and Saturday mornings, I’d slip on my white cotton gloves and take my place behind the counter, ready to accept canisters of Fuji film.

It was 1993, a decade before digital cameras invaded every pocket. Film was expensive so people saved it for big occasions, not brunch. You aimed, pressed the button and hoped you hadn’t cut the birthday kid’s head off. Customers dropped off their small, rattling time capsules , 24 or 36 exposures , and ticked boxes on an envelope: matt if you were arty, glossy if you were everyone else. There were no previews, no filters and no deletions.

Technically, a lot of the photos were terrible. Entire packets of blurry toddlers running through sprinklers. Holiday snaps where everyone’s faces had been bleached by the flash, pupils glowing demonic red.

But from my vantage point, life in my midsized town unspooled. Wedding receptions in function centres with tulle-wrapped pergolas. First-day-of-school shots with uniforms a size too big and Band-Aids on skinned knees.

This was years before cameraphones and dating apps democratised the dick pic, yet people were still determined to immortalise their genitals on 35mm and hand them over at the counter like dry-cleaning. The preferred genre was the “from above” shot: a sternum-to-zipper composition, as though they’d applied selfie-angle advice to the least photogenic subject available. It was a crash course in the full diversity of the human penis.