Sepia Saturday 382 : Tempus Fugit And A Fish Supper

When you have been penning blogposts for more than ten years, you sometimes think that you are all "blogged-out". If you are capable of saying it, you suspect you have already said it. In the case of old images, if they are able to be found and digitised, you suspect you have already found them, scanned them and presented them to the world. When I saw this week's Sepia Saturday theme image, which featured a host of young people in a gymnasium showing off their graceful carriage, I immediately thought of an old family photograph which had been taken in a school hall which also featured graceful young people. 

I felt sure, however, that I must have featured it before on Sepia Saturday and blog-searched back until I found a post from September 2010, analysing the image in question. Although the analysis was  thorough and as incisive as anything I could write now, the strange thing was that the piece was illustrated by the wrong photograph. In place of the wall-remembered photograph of five children there was another photograph which had obviously been taken at the same time and in the same school hall.

Just how this mix-up happened, I have no idea, but it sent me off in search of the two photographs so that I could look at them again and possibly rescan them. This was, as always, a lengthy and complex business: sifting through boxes, folders, and albums; all of which I aspire to call the family archives. Eventually I found them and the effort involved justified their inclusion in my Sepia post this week. It is true that at least one of them has been featured in my blog before. It is true that I have no great revelation about their provenance to share with you. What I have come to realise, however, is that scanning and displaying old photographs is a little like fishing. It is the thrill of the chase which attracts you rather than the fish supper at the end of the day. You can spend a happy hour or two dangling your line into the pool of history and eventually fish out a couple of lovely old images. And then, just as happily, you can throw them back into the shoebox of time, so that you can enjoy the whole process again, seven years later.

To see what others have done with this week's prompt image, go to the Sepia Saturday Blog and follow the links.

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 342 : 1. The Colourful Spice Of Married Life

Sepia Saturday is a little different for the next couple of months: we are trying an experiment and having a monthly theme rather than a weekly one. That doesn't necessarily mean that I will be producing just one Sepia Saturday post per month - we can return to the theme as many times as we want to and I will certainly be revisiting this "Love and Marriage" theme a good number of times during the coming weeks. 

And as Sepia Saturday is trying something different, I thought I would try something different with my first entry for the August theme. In the past I have occasionally been guilty of getting rid of colour to give my featured photos a feeling of appropriate age. This time I am doing just the opposite.

I am trying to teach myself how to hand-colour old monochrome photographs using Photoshop, and my image this week is part of my learning curve. I have used an old scanned half-plate monochrome glass negative as my practice piece and let my imagination run a little wild with the various colours of the outfits of this wedding party.

The fact is they all looked so miserable that I thought they needed cheering up a little so out came my digital paintbrushes and progressive overlays. After all, even the best of marriages needs spicing up occasionally.

To see what others are doing with the Sepia Saturday theme this moth, go to the Sepia Saturday Blog and follow 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.

Sepia Saturday 340 : Time Travel To The Trouville

Our Sepia Saturday theme image this week features a promotional postcard from the Hotel Imperial, Ostend, Belgium. I can match it with another hotel promotional card - this one from the Trouville Hotel, Long Beach, New York. The Trouville was one of many such fine hotels built on Long Beach, Long Island at the height of the resort's fame and fortune at the beginning of the twentieth century. The hotel stood until the 1960s and I can be fairly certain about the date of the drawing which forms the image on the card because of a pencil-written comment on the reverse of the card. This states:

"Original drawing from which this reproduction was made was set up and coloured in water colours by me. It was about three and a half by two and a half inches. Drawn in 1913. R"

It looks like a splendid place to stay. As soon as time travel is perfected, I'm off there for a short break.

If you want a short break - pop on over to the Sepia Saturday Blog and follow the links.

Sepia Saturday 339 : Eyes Down In Sandringham

Our Sepia Saturday theme image this week features a "Picture Palace" and therefore it seemed appropriate to feature a picture of a palace. And where better to turn to when you want to find a visual commentary of British social history than the collected snapshot albums of Frank Fieldhouse ("Uncle Frank").  The joy of these albums - which cover a twenty year period from the early thirties to the early fifties - is not just the photographs, but the written commentary that has been added to the charcoal black album pages in indelible pencil (I can see the substation figure of Uncle Frank given an encouraging lick to the point of the pencil as I write). I have chosen a couple of pages from an album entitled "Great Yarmouth and Norfolk Tour, July/August 1950"

As you can see the photographs were taken outside Sandringham Castle in Norfolk, and yes, that indeed is Auntie Miriam stood next to the policeman. The King they didn't see was King George the Somethingorother. But they were lucky enough to catch sight of Princess Margaret who will have been on her way to the other palace to play bingo.

To see other Sepia Saturday contributions, stroll on over to the Sepia Saturday Blog.

Sepia Saturday 195 : Peace, Virginity and Grosvenor Square

Back in the 1960s, two interests dominated my life - politics and photography. Looking through my negative archives it is surprising how rarely those two interests coincide.  I well remember attending the great Anti Vietnam War demonstration in London in March 1968, but until today I thought that I had no photographic record of the event. But in searching through my archives for a suitable image for Sepia Saturday 195 which marks the International Day of Peace, I came across a short strip of negatives I must have shot on that day in Trafalgar Square. Although I have few photographs of the day, I have many memories of it, and so many of them seem to be in the form of mental images. Here are a few of them, fixed in some magical mental acid-hypo.

• Attending a camp in the woods at Jerusalem Farm on the night before the demo. Talking to a girl around a campfire. She was a trainee baker who had just been sacked from her job for decorating a whole batch of cakes with the peace symbol made out of icing sugar.
• Being told that the Fish and Chip shop in Luddenden, a few miles down the valley, was owned by a Communist who was giving free fish and chips to people attending the demo. Walking down to the village and finding a vast queue of young people outside the shop.
• Waking up in panic in the middle of the night, scrambling out of my sleeping bag and running through the woods as the word went around that there was a police raid. Coming out of hiding later only to discover it was a false alarm.
• Our bus taking us to London being stopped on the outskirts of the city by the police who with typical British politeness asked us all for our names and addresses. I still can't remember whose name and address I gave.
• The great peristaltic wave that forced the massive demonstration down the street leading to American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The sight of the line of mounted police with batons holding the lines of demonstrators back.
• The realisation that a line of demonstrators would make contact with the line of police, get banged on the head or trod on by a horse, and then be carried away by the line immediately behind them, before the next line would advance into battle. The mathematical realisation that I was destined to be in one of the lines that would be hit rather than would carry away the wounded.
• My managing to work my way to the end of the line and make my escape into a hat shop before nipping off down a back alley.

I was reminded of all this by the Sepia Saturday 195 contribution of Hazel Ceej who quoted the great comedian George Carlin who said "Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity". On that day 45 years ago I like to think that I made my own little contribution to peace - in more ways than one.

See how others have responded to the Sepia Saturday theme by going to the Sepia Saturday Blog and following the various links.

Sepia Saturday 192 : Flying Free In Imaginary Braces

When Sepia Saturday started four years ago we didn't have themes: participants merely posted an old picture of their choice and said something about it. Over the years, the idea of weekly themes emerged, but the themes were not words or subjects, they were images. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, it can also give rise to a multiplicity of themes - and that, I believe, is what has kept Sepia Saturday going strong week after week, year after year.

Which brings me to braces. Or suspenders if you are a follower of American English. Our theme image this week shows the bandleader Stan Kenton plus a couple of band members all wearing braces. It was easy enough to find pictures of men wearing braces in my collection of family photographs : braces were the elastic scaffold from which most self-respecting northern working class men hung their clothes. And so I chose a picture of my Uncle John and Auntie Doris, sat on the doorstep of their Bradford terraced house with two children. I have no idea who the children are: they didn't have children so they must have been borrowed for the occasion.

But when I examined the photograph, what struck me about it was not the children, nor was it the braces. It was something about the look on the face of Auntie Doris. There was a certain determination etched into her face and for some reason or another it reminded me of that most powerful photograph by Dorothea Lang of Florence Owens Thompson which is called "Migrant Mother". I suppose I could write a few paragraphs about the similarity of the images and a few more paragraphs about the photographer and the subject. But the connection defies words, it is a visual bond, as fleeting as a momentary glance.

You might look at the two photographs and see no connection, in which case that is fine. Images are not like sentences : you don't have to read them in the right order, you don't have to accept rules of punctuation. You can fly free, allowing you mind to be held up by nothing more than a pair of imaginary braces.

You can see how other people interpreted this weeks' theme image by going to the Sepia Saturday Blog and following the various links.

Sepia Saturday 191 : Defaulting To The Uncomplicated

Things are a bit hectic this weekend as we are celebrating our 40th Wedding Anniversary. So this will be a short Sepia Saturday post. Marilyn was looking after the prompt for Sepia Saturday 191 and her first suggested match for the theme photograph was "man with two wives".  On such a weekend as this I would never dare to go with such a theme and therefore I have defaulted to an uncomplicated "group of three". But looking again at that photograph - which features the celebrated Auntie Miriam and was taken in St Annes in 1941 - it certainly features a penetrating gaze. And who is the other woman? Could Uncle Frank have had two wives? All I can say, after forty years of marriage, is ... silly man.

Please call in at the Sepia Saturday Blog to view the other interpretations of the photographic prompt for Sepia Saturday 191.

Sepia Saturday 190 : The Anaglypta Of Photography

It is wrong to look back to your youth and identify your mistakes with the highlighting pen of regret. What is done is done. As the divine Edith Piaf sang "Non, je ne regrette rien" I can stand here, face the world, and shout out loud : "I regret nothing"  ..... except perhaps that bulk order of stipple photographic paper. Let me explain.

I went looking for an old photograph of a picnic: searching through my archives, flicking through my prints, holding strip after strip of negatives up to the August sunlight. You would think that there would be loads. Picnics have all the ingredients of fine photographic fayre : people, pleasure, summer days, and aluminium teapots. But us Burnett's are a miserable lot : we spend smiles as if they were currency. The best I could come up with was an old print of my parents, Albert and Gladys, in a state of near exhaustion after attempting to enjoy a picnic. I checked to see if I still had the negative but all the squinting in the world revealed nothing. No problem, I popped the print in the scanner and pressed the magic button. 

Moments later I shouted out "Sodding Stipple" with a vehemence that brought my Good Lady Wife rushing in from her afternoon nap. When I was but a lad, I bought a bulk supply of stipple photographic paper which, for a year or two, I used for all the home printing of my photographs. It was cheap, and as long as you looked at it from a distance, it was reasonably acceptable if you weren't too concerned with detail. It was the Anaglypta of photography, the Artex of imaging. The problem with it is, that when you attempt to scan a stipple photograph you get something that looks as if it has been baked on a cellophane bag. Everything - skin, seas, fields and aluminium teapots - is transformed into little ridges of deflected light. Everything is robbed of detail. 

My Sepia Saturday post this week is therefore living proof that the mistakes of one's youth will eventually come back to haunt you. If you would like to see some clearer photographs of picnics, you can go to the Sepia Saturday Website and follow all the links you will find there.

Sepia Saturday 189 : A Fine Sepia Contraption

Our Sepia Saturday theme prompt this week shows an early motor car and is entitled "what an amazing contraption". And it sent me off searching through my various archives for a matching amazing contraption. I eventually found one in a strip of colour negatives I shot back in the early 1980s. But having scanned it and printed it, I was left with the question - what on earth is it? I looked at it one way, and then looked at it another. I rotated it, flipped it, bent it, and squinted at it. And then I slowly began to understand it. The more I concentrated, the more all the individual elements of this most extraordinary contraption became clear in my mind. It might not be high-tech, it might not be digitised and miniaturised - but it contained all you needed to create a weekend of interest and enjoyment. What I had photographed all those years ago - without knowing it at the time - was a Sepia Saturday machine. All you require is a little explanation as to the component parts and you will instantly see all the beauty of this fine sepia contraption.

Clicking the image should make it a bit bigger. My apologies to all those Sepians who I have missed from my listing - but as with all machines, some of the most important bits are hidden from view. You can see the machine at work by going to the Sepia Saturday Blog and following the various links.

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.