Welcome to the Website of Alan Burnett: writer, blogger, collector of old photographs, and devotee of all things pointless and inconsequential.
The Girl With The Throwaway Glance
19th century photography is photography of the constrained: studio photography of fixed poses, fixed smiles and fixed emotions. The twentieth century brought cheaper cameras and that meant photography of the people by the people. Of the people leaning against a wall with arms folded, of the girl with the throwaway glance, of the dog snoozing in the shade.
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Tired Souls
Right next to the Grade 1 listed All Souls’ Church in Halifax, there is a statue of the Halifax mill-owner, social reformer, Member of Parliament and church-builder, Edward Akroyd. On the plinth…
Courage Brewing
This was Courage’s Anchor Brewhouse, which was next to Tower Bridge in London, back in the 1970s. When I took the photograph, breweries were still big and located in the heart of…
Droning On
These days you would just launch a drone, but back in the 1980s we didn’t have drones (probably a good things seeing what else drones can do). If you wanted an aerial…
Britannia In The Trees
Britannia has sat on top of the rather ornate former bank at the end of Elland Bridge for 133 years. You might think she’d get bored, but I suspect she…
Prescience
I took this photograph a couple of days ago, gave it a title, and scheduled it in for my calendar for the 1st of March. Prescient, or what?
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