Welcome to the Website of Alan Burnett: writer, blogger, collector of old photographs, and devotee of all things pointless and inconsequential.
It Was Never So
This image comes from a 120 year old picture postcard of Halifax, and it is about as fake as any modern AI generated concoction. The colours have been painted in with all the skill of an arthritic canary, and the figures appear to have been randomly stuck on with haste as well as paste. Such images frame our view of the past as a time of clean streets, pretty colours, and blue skies. Beware – it was never so.
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Skipping The Puddles
I’ve called this “Skipping the Puddles” because there are lots of skips and lots of puddles. It must be over forty years ago that I took the photograph, which means it was…
Of The Era
I may have used this image before on my daily calendar. After six years, I do occasionally repeat myself. I make no apologies; however, it has always been one of my favourite…
Random Beach
Counting both the photographs I have taken myself over the last seventy or so years and the old photographs I have collected, I currently have some 114,000 stored on my hard disk.…
Down The Sepia Path
This is an old sepia photograph, taken from one of the many old album pages that litter my room. Many people believe that the sepia colour that characterises photographs from…
Cleaning Up
In dating pictures of old Halifax, there are certain events that – rather like the destruction of the dinosaurs in geological times – mark the changeover between major epochs. One…
Concentrating The Mind’s Eye
I took this photograph in Sheffield, forty-odd years ago. Could you take a similar photo now? The bin will certainly be gone, replaced by some overgrown plastic box. I’m not…
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