some quite lovely images

I don;t know why, and it’s worse with moving images, but I always end up feeling a bit down lookign stuff like that.

I think it’s because I know every single person in them is dead now and that all that’s left of them is possibly this one image and that all their hopes and fears for their lives and all the experiences they had cannot possibly be read from their eyes at that one moment.

the usual black and photography of period always gives a drab and colourless impression of the late victorian and edwardian periods. When seeing images like this it brings it closer somehow. The locomotive picture could have been taken yesterday.

We used to live opposite a flea market and there were often old photo albums from the 20’s through to the fifties in there. It was always sad to think that none of those people in the pictures had meant enough to someone to keep them.

I saw those a little while ago, and shared via facebook.

I think they are astonishing, the colour & clarity is great, & you can see in some of the photo’s where people moved slightly in the background – would love to try & reproduce the techniques involved in making those photos.

A mate commented at the time, with digital photography so easy & prevalent these days, what will people who stumble across all our old photo’s think of us in 100 years time?

what will people who stumble across all our old photo’s think of us in 100 years time?

I do wonder if there will be a loss of ‘old’ images due to stuff never being physically printed/produced – formats will change, stuff will get deleted and there won’t be the artefacts available for people to see.

I call fake – everyone knows the world was monochrome back then!

The Retronaut site is good for similar:

http://www.retronaut.co/

I do wonder if there will be a loss of ‘old’ images due to stuff never being physically printed/produced – formats will change

Hmm yeah but there’ll be so much of it that we won’t let the old formats die. Remember GIF has been around for what, 30 years, and is still widely readable and writeable.

Those are lovely pictures.. but because they are so clear it’s hard to view them as historical, not just snaps of some show laid on for tourists or a period drama.

The trouble in the future is that there will be so many images that it will be hard to wade through them all to find anything decent.

quite a good stephen poliakoff TV movie on the photos of the past theme

Sometimes crap images are what’s needed though. Historians learn a lot from what’s everyday junk at the time.

Sometimes crap images are what’s needed though. Historians learn a lot from what’s everyday junk at the time.

I meant decent in terms of interest rather than artistic quality.