Crouching Photographer, Hidden Dog

I reach into an old box of 35mm colour slides and pull out three random slides for scanning, all of which date from the 1960s.

Fircroft College, Birmingham : September 1968

The first was taken in the Autumn of 1968 and shows my bedroom at Fircroft College in Birmingham complete with Cuban posters and a picture of Karl Marx that was a constant feature of the cork pin-boards that framed all our student lives.

John & Doris Burnett 1967

The second was probably taken a year earlier at the Bradford home of my Uncle John and Aunty Doris – and their dog which has to remain nameless as my memory fails me. We always think of the sixties as an era of flower-power – but old photographs suggest that the flowers tended to be limited to the wallpaper and the chair covers.

Gladys, Albert, Norma, Roger and Diana Burnett  1965

The third photograph is easy to date because it shows my niece, Diana, as a baby, and she was born in 1965. The photograph almost has the look of an early “selfie” and one can almost imagine a selfie-stick – complete with mobile phone – extending from Norma’s hand. But this was the age of immobile Bakelite phones and crouching photographers – in this case, me.