Welcome to the Website of Alan Burnett: writer, blogger, collector of old photographs, and devotee of all things pointless and inconsequential.
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 the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the result of fading over time. This isn’t actually the case; sepia toning was specifically introduced to combat the fading that was common in old photographs exposed to light. It later became a fashion statement in its own right, and most Victorian subjects -…
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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 such event…
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 sure about…
Small And Wide In The Arctic
At first glance at this old family photograph, you might think something went wrong with the print’s dimensions: everything appears far too wide for its own good. However, that was my grandmother,…
Ode To A Gable End
This is a proper gable end, not some half-hearted apology for a wall stuck onto the side of an over-delicate bungalow. It’s seen life, this gable end: horses and carts,…
Pretty Good
Let’s start a new month with something pretty. This begins with a photograph I took a few years ago of a bit of land near Upper Edge, Elland, known locally…
Entering Slaithwaite
For status and gravitas, you can’t beat a triumphal arch. Rome has several, Paris has a famous one, and now Donald Trump is getting in on the act in Washington.…
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