Sunday, August 10, 2014

Sepia Saturday 240 : Semi-Detached Pretence


With the Sepia Saturday theme photograph being a picture of an apprehended criminal, one needs to be a little careful in one's choice of subject for Sepia Saturday 240. I am not entirely certain who this couple are, but I suspect that they may be Abraham and Alice Moore, the parents of my Uncle Harry. If the faces look familiar, it is not because you have seen them in countless issues of the Police Gazette or featured on endless "Wanted" posters : they are not the Bonny and Clyde of Bradford. The source of the familiarity is probably much closer to our Sepia home.

Take a closer look at our familiar Sepia Saturday header - the photograph which for 240 weeks now has headed our Sepia Saturday challenge. Take a look at the young couple dressed in their finery ready to start out life together.  And then move forward forty or so years and move them into semi-detached suburbia. 

They seem a quiet couple : bordering on comfortable. They didn't achieve their rise from the terraced streets of Bradford to the semi-detached roads of Bradford by either robbing banks nor robbing people on behalf of banks. It was work. Not the kind of work that sent them hewing coal down the mines or doffing threads on a loom - office work, shop work, quiet work, steady work : but work none the less. Perhaps the black trilby hat and the white soot-defying coat suggest a little pretence. But they earned it. It's not false pretence, more semi-detached pretence.

Visit the Sepia Saturday Blog and follow the links to see other takes on the theme this week.


15 comments:

  1. It's nice to meet Abraham and Alice at the extreme ends of their lives.

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  2. I feasted long on the wedding group, the beautiful white dresses and shoes. And hats. Hard to think of them returning on Monday to typewriters.

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  3. What lovely bookend photos of lives. Definitely satisfying to see and read about. Many thanks. Barb

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  4. This is an interesting way to show the passage of time where you show the end and then the beginning.

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  5. Oh my goodness, I've always wondered more about the who are they in that wedding photo. This is priceless.

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  6. Nicely done spin on the theme, Alan!

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  7. You can see an emotional difference between the two pictures. As bride & groom they both look a little apprehensive - what have I done? How will my life change? Where do we go from here? And in the second photo, there is a calm, peaceful, knowing look between two people who have loved, laughed, and lived good lives together.

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  8. But there is a third shadowy character in the photo hovering before Alice. Perhaps Uncle Harry again?

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  9. It is just the most stunning wedding photo Alan. Thanks for making us take a closer look at it. I love how new the gardens are in the other photo and how you can see all the fences all the way down. I bet it looks different today and everybody's shrubs have grown.

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  10. Anonymous6:55 AM

    Just a thought. Has the bride shrunk a little since the wedding photo ?

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  11. How nice to be re-intrioduced to the Sepia saturday wedding couple knowing that they reached a comfortable old age after a hard working life; no pretences needed.

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  12. I really love this post. I've often wondered who were in the wedding photo and it's so nice to see them after many years of wedding bliss. I love that you made a tribute to their every day hard work. That's life for most of us and it was a sweet way of reminding us.

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  13. Nice "update," so to speak.

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  14. Lovely to see the couple young and then in the prime of life. Like so often happens, he seems to have aged a bit better than she did.

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  15. How nice to see the couple decades later, looking good although a bit detached too.

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