archiving

Often i handle work were the details of the photographer have been lost to time. I’ve always liked the idea that the photo repair and copying services I offer, help preserve at least some of the vintage photography and keep the photographer’s work alive. How much of it gets destroyed or lost each year is anyone’s guess but it is probably more than we’d like to see lost forever.

The above photo is a case in point. Back in August I was contacted by a vintage photography collector who had come across 120 fragile glass negatives that he believed document people who lived in my community back in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era. The images are of a very high quality and cover a good cross section of people. It is a valuable social record of a community or family during the late 19th and early 20th century. The only problem is that the photographer is unknown and the people in the portraits remain nameless. In fact the entire collection, apart from around eight street photographs that are easily identifiable, remains a mystery.

The images are being archived to Flickr and the community website that i designed and help run is attempting to find some answers by pooling the detective work. Someone out there knows who these people are. The locations are also a factor. If we can even identify the locations where some of these images were taken, it will help in the identification.  Hopefully some answers can be found to this photographic mystery.