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Old photographs

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I didn’t want to hijack Carolina’s thread but she mentioned annotating old photographs.
Downsizing at home I came across several photographic slides from the sixties and the seventies. I couldn’t look at fhem properly but hope to get them transferred to digital.
What they did do was make me think back to those times.
The ones I were delighted to see were from 50 (gulp) years ago when I’d just returned from Morocco and had met some friends on my return where we travelled to the Dales for a holiday of meeting girls and drinking. I met up with one of them last month our walking sticks clashed.
Then today a friend sent me this photo I’d taken for a local folk singer, Bill Price,(I was a photography student at the time) for his poster.
As I don’t remember my mother or her family (it’s complicated) there are people in my parents’ wedding photo I have no knowledge of. Carolina’s annotating of photographs is an excellent idea.
I appreciate people find it difficult to add photographs to the forum, but those silver halide shots and colour slides certainly bring back memories of times past.

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  3. I mentioned this before, but some years ago I went through a huge amount of my late parents’ photos and in there is a photo of Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot from the late 70s. In front of them is a schoolboy proudly holding a certificate. Neither parent had any political connections and none us knew who the schoolboy was.

    Stranger still is a second photo with Kinnock and Foot now laughing heartily – Kinnock is holding onto the schoolboy’s shoulders for support, such is his level of hilarity. All the other photos are bog standard pics of family members standing in front of houses or at the seaside along with weddings, birthday parties and so on. At the time these were pretty well-known politicians, so how come this was never mentioned? Why did they take the tine to file these away with the others? I’ll never know.

  4. That’s an excellent photo.

    There’s something about old photos that’s just…. Better than photos today. I think maybe photos are just too ubiquitous today. Funny to think that even a couple of decades ago it still wasn’t normal to document everything and selfie all over the place.

    • The other big difference is that there are no crap photos today, as they just get deleted. When it was on film they got printed, along with everything else.

      I made a point, when the kids were little, of printing off loads of photos and putting them in albums. Otherwise, you just end up with a file on your laptop with thousands of photos in, most of them repeated umpteen times over, in no order and it’s practically impossible to find anything. I started a task of going through and sorting all the electronic photos into folders for that reason. It’s going to be an extremely time consuming project though, so keeps getting shoved to the bottom of the to do list.

      • I have had to scan a large amount of photo’s from my parents collection as they have passed on and we needed to share the pics with the family. I’ve found that sticking the folder on a ‘screen saver’ on our tv is the best way of making sure the pics get seen. These pics haven’t seen the light of day for years if much at all. Now every now and again when we leave the tv on these images appear and get a look in. It’s lovely when the grandkids chuckle at our old holiday snaps.

      • @Paul-Wad

        You’re wrong about there being no crap photos any more, P.

        There are millions and millions of the fucking things and far
        from getting deleted they are clogging up the phones and social
        media platforms of everyone who takes them.

  5. I have loads of old photos, some going back to the 20s when my maternal grandparents got married. I realised a while ago that, rather obviously thinking about it, my great grandparents are in the wedding photos. They were born around 1870ish….that blew my mind.

    I also have boxes of wonderful old photographs recovered from my parent’s house when they passed away and I have no idea who the people are. I haven’t the heart to bin them, but I will never know who they are.

  7. And here is is with mum on the back on the way down to Lulworth Cove. Before they were married no less… Rascal.

  9. As an update about the photo of Bill I emailed it to one of his daughters soon after.
    She was delighted to receive it as Bill died some six or seven years after the photo was taken.
    She said she remembered the denim shirt and kept it after he died.

  10. All my really old photos are back in Blighty (including one of my dad canoodling on a bed with a popsy before he met my mum), but I like this one. Around the turn of the century my daughter’s school did an exchange with a school in Soweto, and here’s the lad staying with us (forgotten his name) teaching the daughter and son gumboot dancing in our kitchen. Love the movement in it.

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  11. My sister is trying to rescue family photos from our mother who is likely to throw them out following it father’s death ( “What do I need photographs for? I know what people look like.’ – that’s very on- brand for her) Is be invested to see some, even if I won’t know who the people in them are.

    • Typos – so many typos. Apologies. My reason, if not excuse, is that I got home late after a 2 hour flight delay, hitting a hour long blank spot in bus schedule to my town, and then a cab that finally got me home about 1am.

      • Sorry, Gatz. Many of us post under less than ideal conditions and make a better job of it than you did here. I’ve had a word with the mods and we’re of the opinion you should step down voluntarily for a while until this thing blows over.

        • While I may not agree with the Mods’ decision I nevertheless respect it, and give my solemn undertaking to the Forum that I will not take an active role within it for the next 60 minutes, or until I’ve had my coffee, whichever is the sooner.

  13. When I go back to see my parents, I leaf through old photograph albums, some going back to the first decade of the 20th century. I take pictures of any interesting ones with my phone, so they get stored in Google photos. Over here in Germany, the facial recognition software allows me to automatically build up individual photo folders, so I get to chart the lifetime development of, among others, my paternal grandparents who both died before I was born. It’s a remarkable way of understanding something of their lives, as my dad never talked about them. What were small 2×3″ photos can be scaled up on screen to reveal candid moments I’d previously never thought to consider.

  14. I think I mentioned this recently. My father received a shoe box of prints from the estate of my late uncle. They were few, yet told a succinct story of their childhood in 1920s and 1930s Melbourne. The timeline started with my emaciated, recently demobbed grandfather working the scrubby garden with my similarly skinny father (he weighed twenty stone in my childhood), then worked through their almost shack-like bungalow, scratched out of the bush, developing into a well established suburban home. Suddenly, at the point my father won a scholarship, they all look better fed and clothed; my grandfather had a double breasted suit and a smart trilby.
    Going through those was probably the best afternoon I have spent with my father.

  15. Somewhere I have a photo of me with my granny, around 1964/5, in Rothesay for the Glasgow Fair fortnight. The thing that struck me when I found it was how old she looks – dressed in a fat coat and a cake hat – and yet, at the time she must have been six or seven years younger than I am now…

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