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Sunday 20 March 2022

A photo for sale

 


 

Today we saw this photo for sale in an antiques centre. It looks like a studio portrait photo of a young woman from perhaps the 1920s or 1930s. We often see old portrait photos for sale in antiques shops but have no idea who would buy them. Sometimes it's clearly the frame rather than the photo, but this photo was in an entirely uninteresting frame.

Yet many decades ago she went to a photographic studio and sat for a portrait photo. She could have been a celebrity but I don't recognise her. Maybe it was a family photo of a daughter, friend, wife or lover, her name and history now forgotten. 

Many items  of this type seem to come from house clearance. Photos and ornaments swept off the mantlepiece or sideboard because nobody wants them. Or there is no longer anyone who could want them, who knows what they are and why they were on the sideboard.

4 comments:

dearieme said...

We have an early photo of people - presumably family - unknown. There's a helpful inscription on the reverse: "all of us in the back garden".

Sam Vega said...

I always find these things rather sad, mainly because of the issue of mortality and fragility - time having swept all these people away and them existing now merely as a name in a family tree, if that. But also because of not knowing what should become of these photos and tangible reminders of what cannot now be recalled. At my wife's training college, I helped out in the library, clearing up and re-shelving books. There were lots of old photos, piles of them stacked away in cardboard boxes. Mainly of groups of trainee clergymen in rows (like a "year photograph") or of individuals meeting with robed bishops or grand ladies, etc. They all looked very earnest and decent young men, and I often picked up the photos and wondered what had become of them. Almost certainly all dead now. The librarian said that one day we would have a big clear out and chuck them in the skip, but it certainly didn't feel right to do that. But what use are they?

Anonymous said...

There's a very sad/nostalgic youtube video of abandoned British cemeteries and churches in India - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB5f6pZ6d5Y - you might want to mute the sound if you don't like Current 93.

A K Haart said...

dearieme - Mrs H and I both chuckled at that because it the kind of thing our mothers might have written on the back of a family photo. We have some old family photos with similarly unhelpful words.

Sam - yes they are rather sad but as you say, what use are they? I once knew a chap who never took photos because he said they bring nothing back and in a sense he was right. Without at least some additional information they are nothing.

Anon - it is sad. A well done video I thought.