The Family Photo Album

In the 1960s I was a far more serious individual

My unofficial Christmas present to myself was a scanner – the computer variety, that is, not the David Cronenberg exploding head version. My previous scanner had died a death somewhere between the end of Windows XP support and getting the thing to work on Linux Mint (although my Linux PC blew up in spectacular fashion last week so it’s probably just as well.) Anyway, one thing I had been planning to do for a while is to digitise old family photos – a task which it turns out is far more time consuming than I had ever imagined.

Back in the day the typical pram was bigger than a car.

Part of the reason to scan the photos had been an attempt to try and preserve them. Some of the photos were taken by professional photographers and these at least had the advantage of being well framed, in focus and taken on decent quality film in the first place. However, most snaps were taken on cheap and simple home photographic equipment: Kodak Instamatics and even Brownies (for the older ones) whereas some of the later ones were taken on the slim-line “110” cameras which did have the advantage that the camera shape allowed for a steady hand but were let down with the tiny 10mm film size.

Early colour: the pram was bigger than our Austin A40

All of the photographs have faded although this was actually worse on the later colour pictures. I’m actually not sure whether it is the film or prints that were at fault here. I’ve managed to use the Windows Photo software to try and re-tint these ones. It’s actually quite successful up to a point although I’m really not the best person to be a judge of what the colours should have looked like: I tend to favour a bright and cheerful look but this may not be as agreeable to someone who has reasonable colour vision.

My great-grandfather in his Dad's Army uniform.

The other reason I have tried to get these digitised is that I want to get as many as possible catalogued whilst there are still enough old relatives alive that know what the photos were of. There are quite a few photos of weddings and the like that are beautifully preserved but that none of my living relatives have a clue of who they are of. We are assuming that they are family of some variety but we can’t tell quite how they are related to us. They are still of interest, of course, but it would be nice to place exactly who they are of. In a similar way I would have liked to have had some more pictures of my great-grandparents, particularly in India, but the only ones from there are official pictures of my great-grandfather in his police uniform. It’s still nice to see but at that time photography was really the preserve of the well-to-do.
 
Of course what is interesting in many of the photos is not so much the photo itself but what is on it preserved from that time. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to determine exactly what is of interest at the time as the eye is always drawn to what is new and shiny rather than what is about to be lost to half-forgotten memory. This picture is interesting. It was taken in 1977 and shows the clean and pristine Liverpool waterfront which had been cleaned up in time for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations. Of course, what would have been more interesting now is a picture from 1976 when the Liver Building was still jet black from soot accumulated from the city’s coal fires. The photo is now of more interest as it shows what the city’s 20th Century skyline looked like: since the turn of the century many new buildings have been erected which have radically altered the look of the city.

Liverpool 1977 - all the soot removed in time for the Queen's silver jubilee.

I’ve really only scratched the surface on this. There are several boxes worth of photographs to go through and even just going through the main albums has taken me over a week. That’s even before I start to sift through my own photo albums: It seems the norm now but 15 years ago a digital camera was still something of a novelty.