This photograph brought makes me smile. I came across it while browsing a French digital photo magazine.

My first reaction? A mix of nostalgia and quiet joy.

I often take the ferry – in Istanbul, it is an ordinary means of transport – and we all sit there with our eyes lowered to our screens. I think of Janine Niépce’s image, a distant relative of the french photography pioneer Nicéphore.

It is 1963. The photographer invites us into the home of a French family. Three generations, their eyes turned toward a screen we cannot see.

The father, with his good-natured expression, is perhaps a civil servant who, in the midst of the economic boom, has spent his bonus on a new television set.

Faces attentive, amused. The youngest decipher the images. Eyes shining before the new totem.

They sit close together on chairs. Uncomfortable, yet together. Perhaps they do not even have a proper living room. The television stands in the parents’ bedroom, guarding a precious possession.

The rest of the house – I imagine it – a bathroom, a warm kitchen where meals are shared, two bedrooms, one for the children and one for the grandmother.

The photograph shows what is there and suggests what lies beyond. It leaves clues. It opens the space outside the frame. 

The photographer stands where she needs to be. No special effects. No demonstrative aesthetics. A balanced composition. An attentive presence – the so called straight photography – capable of humanising the scene.

This image takes me back to the 1980s. We too would gather for the evening film. Sometimes nice one. Sometimes trivial. But it did not matter.

It was a ritual. We laughed, we were moved, we commented. Then a kiss, and off to bed. And the next day at school we were excitedly commenting with our schoolmates: “Did you see Fantomas?” 

A good photograph is never a verdict, an arrival. It is a starting point. The photographer points one way. The one who looks go further. This photo took me through different times. And you?

Sixty years later, it has become a bridge. A bridge between generations. Beyond changing times, I like to think something remains. Not the object, but the story it tells.

From the 1960s to today, passing through the 1980s, for me, a thread of nostalgia runs through the image.

Not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.