Talking To Gladys On The Sands

Scanning and retouching old photographs is a little like doing a jig-saw puzzle - it allows you to get up close to detail. Cast a passing glance at a photograph from eighty-odd years ago - you can use this photograph of my mother, Gladys, on the seaside sands as an example - and you might notice the main subject or the approximate location, and then you move on to something else entirely like making a cup of tea or watching Coronation Street. When you are scanning and retouching however, you dedicate time to detail - the shape of the handbag, the activity of the crowds in the background, the pattern of the dress. You sit down and talk to the people and share memories.

It's That Child Again

It's that child again. Well, I think it's that child again, but I am not sure. It might be him or it might be his brother. "te ipsum" said the Romans; and the Greeks said the same thing even earlier (but their interpretation of the phrase is a character set too far), but how can you know thyself after a period of almost seventy years and a stone or two of living. It should be me. The child is laughing and I was always the one with an inane grin on my face. No doubt my brother will write in and say it is a photograph of him and not me. But I don't believe it - he was never as bonny as me.

Sepia Saturday 342 : Shouting Love In Sepia

Our Sepia Saturday theme this month is "love and marriage" and whilst last week I focussed on the second half of this couplet, today I am looking at the first half - love. 

And if this old, faded photograph of my parents - Albert and Gladys - says anything it says love. It shouts it through the sepia salts, roars it through the cracks and creases of the tiny print. 

You can set this old print next to any million pixel, super high definition digital image fresh from the most mobile of smart phones. You can put it up against the sharpest razor sharp print, the perfectly balanced colour profile, the most competently composed composition. 

And still this old and faded photo would win. It screams love - love that can overcome the ravages of time.

This month our theme is LOVE AND MARRIAGE. See all the posts by visiting the Sepia Saturday Blog and following the links.

Sepia Saturday 341 : It's Just The Way It Changes Like The Shoreline And The Sea

Our Sepia Saturday theme image this week features a rowing boat deep underground at the Speedwell Caverns in Derbyshire. I am keeping the boat but moving up a few hundred feet and featuring a picture of my mother leaning against a rowing boat in her favourite location of all - where the shoreline meets the sea. I featured another picture of Gladys a couple of days ago on what would have been her 105th birthday. This photograph must have been taken thirty years before the Blackpool picture and the location has changed to Shanklin in the Isle of Wight. My mother has changed as well - changed into this slim fashionable woman of the 1930s. But when you are looking from the perspective of time, change is a function that exists irrespective of the direction of travel.

To see other changes, take a visit to the Sepia Saturday Blog and see what other old photographs people have discovered.

Gladys In Blackpool : A Birthday Celebration

July 27th was my mother's birthday and she would have been 105 years old today. To mark the day I have dug deep into the box containing old photographic odds and ends and discovered an unframed 35mm colour slide dating back to the 1960s. When scanned and cleaned-up it shows my mother, Gladys, stood on the sands at Blackpool - at that point where the land and the water meet, a point that was always her favourite location. The fact that it was Blackpool didn't really matter, she would have been just as happy in Scarborough, or Bournemouth or, I suspect, Tristan da Cunha: as long as she was at the point where sand and sea met and she could gaze out towards the distant horizon looking for - who knows what?

I don't know what because, I regret to say, I never asked her. I doubt that it was the sea that was the draw: she didn't particularly enjoy being on the sea as such. And it wasn't the established seaside paraphernalia that attracted her: she wasn't one for deck chairs and pony rides, hot dogs and cold bathing. I like to think that it was the merging and the margin that appealed to her - the point and which land became sea; the point at which one state became another.

I enjoy the seaside as well as the next man, but it doesn't draw me like it drew my mother. However I am fond of the merging at the margins, the transformation of one thing into something else. I am drawn to that place where an image is transformed from being a factual record into something else. I am not quite sure what that something else is, but the very same photograph of my mother in Blackpool provides a good example. The left of the photograph shows a perfect representation of my mother: wrapped up against the wind blowing off the Irish Sea, anchored to the wet sands in her fur boots. By the time your eye has reached the right of the photograph, something else is taking place - something to do with impressions and shapes and colours and memory.

So this birthday celebration allows both my mother and I to wander the place we love the best, observing the coming together of sea and land, reality and memory. Happy birthday Mam.

Sepia Saturday : My Father And A Woman I Seem To Hardly Know

How strange. This photograph clearly shows my father, but I had to look very carefully indeed before confirming that it was indeed my mother he was standing next to. They are obviously both quite young, and it would be another fourteen years or so before I came along, but I had to search long and hard before finding elements of the facial features that I could recognise.

I suspect that the photograph was taken about 1934, when they were both 23 years old, and a couple of years before they got married. Maybe it's because it is a fairly formal photograph or that my mother has a very serious look, but I have difficulty seeing her in this elegant and beautiful young woman.

Has anything ever been invented more wonderful than a photograph?

Take a look at some other wonderful old photographs by visiting the Sepia Saturday Blog and following the links you will find there.