Cromer Pier now and then

click photo to enlarge
Frances Frith (1822-1898) was a Victorian entrepreneur, who, after making his money in wholesale groceries and printing, established himself as a photographer and a supplier of postcard views. It's likely that he took an amateur interest in the relatively new field of photography before he set off to photograph Egypt and the Holy Land in 1856. After his return to England he established a business in Reigate supplying postcards of the images he had taken overseas. However, his firm really took off when he set it the task of photographing every town and village in the British Isles, so that postcards could be sold in all these localities. Frith took many of the images himself, but increasingly employed staff to assist with the task. He persuaded the Post Office to stock his cards, as well as two thousand tobacconists, newsagents and other shops. His photographic postcards were printed in enormous quantities by a firm in Saxony. Frith tried not to just record the places and historic sites, but to compose images innovatively and sensitively, offering the buyer a record that was both pleasing and truthful. He never quite succeeded in his aim of photographing every location, but his firm was, nonetheless, a great success. It remained a family business until 1968, and in other hands continues to this day as The Francis Frith Collection.

I recently bought a book that features a large selection of Frith's photographs. They are shown in the context of Britain as it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, compared with photographs of the same scenes today. An extensive narrative comments on what the images depict, and opines on the changes that can be seen. It is the most disappointing book I've bought for a very long time. This is largely because the tone of the author's voice is, in the main, too negative and too condemnatory of change for my taste. He seems to have some difficulty seeing and writing about the changes for the better that are evident today, and to be too accepting of the superiority of the past. Fortunately I'd bought the book second-hand for very little!

I was reminded of my book when I was processing this photograph of Cromer Pier. It contains three photographs of the Norfolk coastal town. However, the search facility at The Frith Collection took me to a list 169 views! And very interesting and useful this proved too. I was able to compare my photograph with a view from 1901, the year before the pier's official opening, and get an idea of what remains of the original structure.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 12mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/640
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A lesson from Victorian photograph albums

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The other day I was looking at a couple of Victorian albums that contain photographs of some of my wife's ancestors. As I turned the pages, looking at the sepia and hand-coloured images of men and women posing in photographers' studios, I reflected that a print is still the best way of archiving family snaps. The dress of the people in these photographs - men in suits or military uniform, women in their finery, and children dressed like miniature adults - are of a style that suggests most of the shots are from the second half of the nineteenth century, with some from the early 1900s. And yet these photographs, of which many are well over 100 years old, still look clear, sharp, and for the most part show little evidence of fading.

When I shot 35mm film my final images were either black and white, colour prints, or colour transparencies. I converted to digital photography in 2000. During that first year I made an album, printing photographs of different sizes on a single sheet of paper, and captioning them. I'm ashamed to say that since that time my printed output has declined substantially. Like many photographers my archives remain digital. I keep RAW files ordered by date and location, and processed files by date and caption. I do print images but these are usually larger format for display - from 10x8 inches up to 13x19 inches, and very occasionally a few 6x4 inches snapshots. There are those who argue that digital archives are the easiest and best way of storing photographs, and for keen amateurs and professionals that is certainly so. But for the average person (and the keen amateur and professional), who might well want the images to pass down through future generations as a piece of family history, I can see them being next to useless. No, for that purpose you can't beat durable prints, because they require no special (or maybe obsolete) equipment to view them, and are so easy to access.

However, there is one additional item that is guaranteed to make them last longer, and be valued more highly by your descendants, and that is an expensive, attractive and durable album. Had the prints in today's photograph been stored in shoe boxes I very much doubt whether they would have survived beyond a few decades. But, in leather-bound albums with metal clasps, mounted in frames on gold-leaf edged pages, they became objects of fascination and beauty, repositories of the family's past, and heirlooms to be cherished. The albums shown above have all those qualities and more, and yet they lack one vital finishing touch: they aren't captioned. This is a small tragedy. Some have a few notes about the people shown, written in pencil on the back. But the rest are anonymous except for those that an aged relative was able to identify before she died.

So, my recommendation to photographers is "look to the future now". The images we make that are most significant to our families are those of relatives and friends. Print those shots, bind them well, caption them carefully, and you'll earn the gratitude of generations not yet born. There's only one problem with me dispensing exhortations of this sort: I'll now have to make a start on following my own advice!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro, (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/5
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On