Famzine Issue 2 Winter 2022

Famzine

In This Issue:

Annebella Pollen Simon Robinson Nigel Martin Shephard Tina Rowe Ann Larkham

‘VERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPHIES DEMAND THE INTERVENTION OF SUITABLY VERNACULAR HISTORIES’ — GEOFFREY BATCHEN, 2000

FAMZINE: ISSUE 2, WINTER 2022

Since our inaugural exhibition, Auto-Memento, at Swindon Museum & Art Gallery in 2019, Te Family Museum has won fans, made friends and met collaborators. T rough our project, we have found that the allure of family photography is both potent and far-reaching, and although its formal scholars are still few, they are ardent in their pursuits.

Yet family photography as a serious subject of study has crept up on us, and caught us of guard with its art-historical heterodoxy. As absorbing as f ne art, though remaining almost entirely artless, vernacular photographs goad us into thinking more deeply about how to approach a critique of them, and so too the history of photography itself. In this second edition of Famzine, some relevant voices share their thoughts on this and on aspects of their own work.

Dr Annebella Pollen, Professor of Visual and Material Culture at University of Brighton, discusses her beginnings as a collector and academic, and how this niche of photography has the potential to unearth marginalised or forgotten stories that refect the changing patterns of the postmodern family cell.

Author and publisher Simon Robinson talks about the subject of his new book, Go Home On A Postcard, an extensive study of the almost forgotten phenomenon of ‘walkies’ – paparazzolike snapshots of passers-by taken by roving commercial street photographers. Popular from the early 20th century until the 1960s, walkies appear in most family albums from this period.

Te Family Museum co-founder Nigel Martin Shephard writes about ferrotype photography – the theme of our September 2022 exhibition, Artists and Hustlers: 100 Tintypes, which was shown at Te Art Workers’ Guild, London, and was designed to map the genre’s journey from the studio to the street. →

Artist Tina Rowe, who has been collecting and using found photographs for several years, describes her experimental practice of printing vernacular photographs on unusual yet pertinent substrates. Te resulting artworks touch on memory, loss and disappearing social conventions.

Finally, genealogist Ann Larkham talks about the research she undertook to bring into focus the lives of three brothers and to piece together a part of her own family history.

We are very grateful to all our contributors for their insights, and excited to have shared our passion for family photography with them. Since the f rst edition of Famzine was published in Winter 2019, the global network of fellow travellers we have met on this incredible photographic journey signals to us that vernacular photography can only grow in importance and relevance within the context of photographic history.

nigel Martin Shephard Co-Founder The Family Museum

Rachael Moloney Co-Founder The Family Museum

Famzine is Published by The Family Museum.

Editors: Nigel Martin Shephard and Rachael Moloney. Design: Rachael Moloney and Nigel Martin Shephard. © The Family Museum and Famzine Contributors 2022. The Legal Copyright Owner of All Images in The Family Museum Archive is Always Sought by The Family Museum. Contact Us: thefamilymuseum@gmail.com; www.thefamilymuseum.co.uk.

Thanks to our Families and Friends who have Encouraged us on The Family Museum Journey, Which Began with the Support of Kathleen Shephard. Nigel: Mike Collins, Mark Farhall, Shane Kingdom and Staff at Array, Arabella Stearns, Sonia Taouhid. Rachael: Mary Pacey, Muriel, Kevin and Paul Moloney, Kiera coffee, Benjamin Kempton. Found Images: Cover; Pages 3, 4, 7, 14-15, 21, Photographer Unknown; Page 27, Vintage Kodak Print Wallet, All The Family Museum Archive.

CONTRIBUTORS

Dr Annebella Pollen teaches at University of Brighton. Her publications include Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life (Routledge, 2015) and Nudism in a Cold Climate: Te Visual Culture of Naturists in Mid-20th-Century Britain (Atelier Éditions, 2021). Annebella’s next book is on the history of photography by children. research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/annebella-pollen

Tina Rowe makes extensive use of analogue photographic processes in her practice, and is interested in ways of expressing and revealing cultural heritage and personal experience. Tina frequently explores ideas of presence and portraiture in her use of found imagery and through collaborative methods in the production of new portraits. tinarowe.co.uk

Simon Robinson grew up around cameras and prints as his grandfather and father were keen amateur photographers. In his studio at art college, Simon’s own photographs rubbed up against snapshots gleaned from the street markets of Manchester. Simon went on to become a graphic designer, but his fascination with found snapshots continued and formed the basis for his research into commercial street portrait photography. His publishing imprint Easy On Te Eye Books will be publishing Go Home On A Postcard later this year. easyontheeyebooks.wordpress.com

Ann Larkham has a passion for old family photos that started as a child with her nan’s stories and an old cardboard box of treasures. Tis led her to a genealogical qualifcation, published articles in Family Tree magazine and, more recently, plans for a ‘photogenealogy’ book and business. www.photogenealogy.co.uk

FINDING FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY: EDGES AND MARGINS

BY DR ANNEBELLA POLLEN

My f rst entry to the formal study of family photographs began on a chilly autumn morning in 2003 at a car boot sale in Wimbledon. My partner, a bric-a-brac dealer, bought fve interwar albums with a view to selling them, but instead passed them to me. So began my journey, researching their maker, f nding the family depicted and reading photographic literature. Te albums’ secrets and lies became my MA thesis and launched my academic career. Te story of changing attitudes to family photography over the past 20 years is, for me, wrapped up in biography. Tat fts, for the subject is always intertwined with our own photos and families, even if academics do not always foreground these backstories.

Te study of family photographs had certainly been side-lined in wider histories, as scholars sought to bring art status to photography in the 1970s. It was too aesthetically repetitive and too ordinary to achieve the position that art demands. But by the 1980s, sociologists were researching its everyday practices and feminists were examining how it concealed and revealed interior worlds of gender and domesticity. In the digital 1990s, collectors appreciated the alternative visions found in anonymous analogue photographs. Artists imagined new narratives and images into albums’ absences.

I followed these approaches, looking at how the vast mass of amateur photographs might ofer a historical solution to a contemporary problem: the abundance of photographs circulating online in unprecedented quantities. My sources moved from car boot sales to museums and archives, but I remain interested in the marginal. Unwanted photographs

Above: Unsorted Box of Prints in the Mass Observation Archive, Containing some of the 55,000 Photographs Submitted to the 1987 ‘One Day for Life’ Project (The Subject of Annebella’s PhD and First Book, ‘Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life’)

reveal important cultural hierarchies; overlooked histories provide new lenses to see the world afresh.

Along the way, new scholarship has redef ned the feld. Cultural geographers, for example, now analyse how family photographs move and circulate, and global viewpoints expand family photography’s geographical borders. Te family, too, has broadened its boundaries as more diverse collections are collected and exhibited, disrupting racial biases about whose histories get preserved. Similarly, identities and sexualities that normative nuclear structures could not easily contain are becoming increasingly visible. Family albums always told partial stories; ofen it is their mix of revelation and mystery that intrigues. Te study of family photographs also had its own silences, but new voices are emerging. As photographic quantities grow, so too must photographic studies expand and diversify. Tere must be as many stories as there are families. →

Opposite: Polyfoto Portraits of Annebella’s Mother, Josephine Purtill, 1963 Above: Wilfred Sultan, ‘Shadow of Me Taking a Photograph of Forget-Me-Nots in the Garden, 11A Brim Hill, Finchley. 5 May 1940’ Below: Stephen Pinkerton, Submission to the ‘One Day for Life’ Project, 14 August, 1987, with Permission of the Mass Observation Archive

BACK IN

BY SIMON ROBINSON

It is perhaps inevitable that unique collections of vintage family photographs, built up by people, sometimes across a lifetime, are ofen broken up by dealers to sell.

My own area of research has focused on images produced by commercial photographers working at resorts in the walking pictures trade. I was keen to acquire two of the walking photos (above) illustrating this article, but purchased four associated snapshots as well, to ensure the small collection stayed together and helped me piece together the story. Te original owner had penned dates and locations on the backs of the photos and this enabled me to learn more about the context.

We know the three women in the images had two short breaks in the Lancashire resort of Blackpool in May (Whit holiday) and August 1940. Te seller added that, from other material being dispersed, it seemed one of the women was a teacher from Rochdale, so perhaps her two friends were as well. Te popularity of commercial street photographs is sometimes

explained by people lacking a camera of their own, yet many people ticketed by these cameramen can be seen carrying a camera to take their own snapshots (as opposite right). Indeed such cameras could ofen be hired at resorts. T is suggests people were up for buying the prints ofered by the commercial photographer for their novelty value and the ofen unexpected thrill of being singled out for a portrait.

Te better of the two walkies (opposite right) was taken by Blackpool’s Walkie Snaps, which was set up in the 1920s as the craze for walking pictures began to take of. Advertising ‘Clear, Natural Action Photographs’, Walkie Snaps operated well into the 1950s and had photographers working under licence at various pitches and on the piers in Blackpool. Kiosks around the town sold the prints later in the day upon presentation of a numbered ticket. With visitor numbers to Blackpool →

ofen in the hundreds of thousands a day, the trade was astonishingly busy, yet well organised and able to handle the logistics of taking and processing thousands of photos daily.

Te second walkie (previous page) is by an unknown operator sited of the pavement in a front garden, possibly to comply with licensing rules. On 19 May, our trio were staying at 22 Boothroyden, then a guest house, where they snapped each other ‘outside “digs”’ with their own camera. An unknown gentleman can be seen in the doorway, and another appears in a photograph taken on the pier, again with their own camera.

While Allied armies were fghting to get of the beaches at Dunkirk, people back home tried to carry on as normal. Te women’s smart clothes, hairstyles and head scarves are straight out of a 1940s fashion guide. One accessory that really stands out are the round white-rimmed plastic sunglasses, which were fashionable at the time (thanks to photographs in f lm magazines of female Hollywood stars wearing them). Te sunglasses give some of these photographs a bit of an otherworldly look today.

In their very early 20s here, the three women were born 100 years or so ago. Tus the enjoyment of these images is inevitably tempered by the knowledge that they have only appeared on the second-hand market as a likely result of their owner passing away and a lack of interest from surviving family, if indeed there were any. It is thanks largely to collectors that at least some of this material and the social history attached to it is being recognised and preserved.

ARTISTS AND HUSTLERS

BY NIGEL MARTIN SHEPHARD

Tintype photography trod the same path as all early Victorian photography, leaning at f rst on painting for its credibility and courting the wealthy for its patronage. Yet the simplicity and swi f ness of the wet collodion process used to produce tintypes, and the cheapness and durability of the metal ferrotype plates that formed their substrate, meant that a diverse pool of non-professionals could take up photography, in locations far-fung from the well-appointed studio.

With little technical know-how needed, the tintype trade was open to any chancer or adventurer entering the feld. T is new kind of operator took their inspiration not from the world of art but from the shady commercial world of street hawkers, showmen and carnies. Ads for tintype cameras could read: ‘Requiring no skill to operate’ and ‘A good way of clearing debts’.

T roughout the Victorian era and well into the 20th century, the cheap rail or coach excursion was an extremely popular sojourn for cash- and time-strapped working people. Tese day-trippers, looking for entertainment and cheap thrills, proved fertile customers for the while-you-wait tintypists, and provided the sales tra fc needed for businesses working at the edges of proftability. Tintypes could be produced in a matter of minutes, and were the ideal inexpensive and fun memento of a good day out.

One unique aspect of ferrotype photography is that many of the cameras used have a very shallow depth of feld, sometimes as little as one inch. T is can result in intimate and absorbing portraiture – a feature exploited by the many contemporary tintypists who have opened boutique studios across the US and Europe. Te tintype is once again gaining its art status.

CERAMIC GHOSTS

BY TINA ROWE

I was given a box of negatives found at a car boot sale along with some other photographic items. It seems the negatives were developed by an amateur photographer who wasn’t particularly skilled, so it was di fcult to gauge what the images were without printing them. At the same time, I was experimenting with liquid photographic emulsion, painting it onto di ferent substrates to see how it worked. I decided to test the negatives with other items that had been discarded –ceramics from old dinner sets.

I chose the sets because they are family objects that, like the negatives, can easily come unmoored from their context. Some plates are from famous ceramics factories, such as Wedgwood and Royal Worcester. With their hand-painted marks, gilding and transfers, they are objects that represent ways of doing things that would seem mannered and old-fashioned today. Tey reminded me of my parents, who treasured objects like these, not least because they made readable and emphatic social statements, which seemed petty to me as a child but are now a reminder of people I’ll never see again.

Tere is symbolic weight in printing lost people onto fragments of a way of living that has also lost its currency. Whenever I have shown this work, people talk about their own family albums; they point out the similarities between the people I have printed and people they have known. I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know how each plate was orphaned and what circumstances brought them to the charity shops where I bought them. But I’m pretty certain that the elements of family life that made the photographer click the shutter, or the people look into the lens, are very similar.

THREE PHOTOS OF THREE BROTHERS

BY ANN LARKHAM

‘Photogenealogy’ is the art and science of caring for and enjoying family history photographs, not only for the sake of the photographs, but because each image is a genealogical time capsule containing clues, memories and stories. I inherited a collection of these time capsules from my nan, including three photographs: one very familiar to me of my grandad and two of people unknown to me. Tese photographs initiated three di ferent avenues of research, which revealed the stories of three brothers.

Although no one alive in my family knew who this young man was, the photograph held a vital clue: a WWI uniform with unusual black buttons. Historical research revealed that only Ri fe Brigade soldiers wore black buttons. I knew from previous investigation that my grandfather had an older brother, Tomas, who had served in the Ri fe Brigade and died at the Somme during the war. Corroboration with other facts suggested that this was a photograph of my grandad’s brother, Tomas.

William (Mick) Holding 1906-1966

I had grown up with this photograph of my grandad, which he sent to his mother during WWII, but sadly I barely remember him. Te memories I do retain are of an older and unwell man, not this dashing young soldier serving in exotic locations. I knew little about his time in the army because, although my nan and I regularly looked at his photos, we did not discuss his service. However, this photograph ofered vital information on the reverse, including his regiment and service number, which allowed me to apply for copies of his service records, thus shedding light on this previously hidden chapter of his life.

Sharing my research with the Islington Heritage Service (Tomas’s home town was London) led to my family unveiling a plaque at a service to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. Reports of the service in local newspapers included Tomas’s story and this photograph –a ftting way to honour a young man and a heart-warming f nale to my research. →

Thomas Holding 1896–1916

My mum recognised this photograph of Albert, her uncle, with fond memories and an intriguing story. Albert had been married, had a son and separated from his wife before my mum was born. T is resulted in Albert’s son, Jack, being estranged from our family. No family historian can resist such a mystery. I used public records to conf rm the facts of the story and then turned to contemporary sources to trace Jack forward through time. T is resulted in a meeting of two cousins for the f rst time at the ages of 77 and 84, and the reunion of a family.

Treasured family photographs don’t just capture moments of our ancestors’ lives and elicit wonderful memories, they can inspire research that reveals life stories; they can create opportunities for reconnection; and they can provide the potential to honour our predecessors.

The Full Stories of Two of the Brothers, Thomas and Albert, Appeared in ‘Family Tree’ Magazine, December 2016, pp68-70, and November 2017, pp68-71 Respectively.

Albert Holding 1902–1968