alanburnett.com

Welcome to the Website of Alan Burnett: writer, blogger, collector of old photographs, and devotee of all things pointless and inconsequential.


Never, Never, So

.. And speaking of fakes! No doubt people will recall the time Vincent van Gogh spent in Halifax in the early 1870s, and his fondness of the view from Greetland overlooking the Calder Valley towards Wainhouse Tower. This painting of his dates from that time. I know what you skeptics are going to say: “the tower wasn’t completed until 1875”. Van Gogh had such an imagination, however.

Keep reading

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…

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…

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…