Smiles – smiles on photos, at least – were a twentieth century invention: smiles on the faces of the subjects of Victorian photographic portraits are as rare as Trumpian truths. The reason was partly that Victorian cameras could only cope with fixed expressions – but it was also partly that they tended to be a miserable lot. By the 1920s […]
I am not sure where this little print came from – no doubt it was part of some job lot of old photographs I bought. It shows the crowded deck of a boat, and must have been taken at some point in the 1920s. It could be a ferry, but the people seem a little too well-dressed to be crossing […]
PICTURES FROM NOWHERE : OAKS AND STONE, RUPERRA, 7th APRIL 1932 An old photograph of a young man walking near Ruperra Castle in Wales in 1932. The photo is entitled “Oaks and Stone”, but that poetic title is the extent of my knowledge. This is a print from a tiny album of photographs taken in 1932 at Ruperra Castle in […]
My first thoughts about this studio photograph of an unknown young woman was that it might have been taken during the Great War. There is a confidence about her – the kind of confidence which came from women working in the factories and workshops, a confidence that somehow rose above the dangers of the workplace and the tragedy taking place […]
There is a short caption on the reverse of this small print, and it suggests that the photograph was taken in Ramsgate in July 1934. I am no expert on women’s fashion, but the 1934 date seems about right for this somewhat distinctive dress. Just looking at the heads on show and I might have thought that it dated from […]
This is a scan of a quarter-plate glass negative which must date from the end of the nineteenth or early twentieth century. The seven featured subjects are an interesting collection: they could be the staff of a draper’s shop or a saloon bar. There is something vaguely H G Wells about them – that might be a young Mr Polly […]
I visited the Fashion Museum in Bath last week and, whilst the features exhibits were all very interesting, they tended to concentrate on the clothes being worn by Kings, Queens, Dukes and the like. If I have an interest in fashion, it is as a means of dating photographs – and the photographs I am interested in tend to be […]
This is such a busy photograph: a summer day on the English coast ninety years or so ago. It looks as though it has been taken from a raised height – a pier or a tower or some such. The camera couldn’t quite cope with the wide-angle of the shot, and the edges blur into insignificance. If we focus down […]
Over the last few months I have featured a number of scans from an old photograph album I bought earlier this year which tells the story of a cruise to the Northern Capitals of Europe in 1925. I found this album by chance on an antique stall, and when I bought it for a few pounds the stall-holder asked me […]
