Two mini CDVs from Brighton

Thursday, 29 March 2012

Here are two mini CDV photographs from my Brighton photographers collection. With my general blog theme of time travel, I have to say that the young girl looks rather out of place in Victorian times. In fact she would look more at home today.

Both these photographs are favourites of mine. The young girl was photographed by Mora Ltd of Brighton and Southsea at some time between 1901 and 1910 (there is nothing on the back), the lady in the other photograph was captured between 1889 and 1905. On the back of that photograph there is a pencil note which says something like "Yours Sincerely H Henty" but the writing is not very clear. The photographs are approximately 40mm x 80mm in size.

From "Time and Again" by Jack Finney (1970):

Because I've always felt a wonder at old photographs not easy to explain. Maybe I don't need to explain; maybe you'll recognize what I mean. I mean the sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you're seeing was once real. That light really did reflect into a lens from these lost faces and objects. That these people were really there once, smiling into a camera. You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can – what was just inside the door.

The wonder is even stronger with old stereoscopic views – the almost, but not quite, identical pair of photographs mounted side by side on stiff cardboard, that, looked at through the viewer, give a miraculous effect of depth. It's never been a mystery to me why the whole country was once crazy about them. Because the good ones, the really clear sharp photographs, are so real: Insert a view, slide it into focus, and the old scene leaps out at you, astonishingly three-dimensional. And then, for me, the awe becomes intense. Because now you really see the arrested moment, so actual it seems that if you watch intently, the life caught here must continue. That the raised horse's hoof so startlingly distinct in the foreground must move down to the solidness of pavement below it again; those carriage wheels revolve, the girl walk closer, the man move on out of the scene. The feeling that the tantalizing reality of the vanished moment might somehow be seized – that if you watch long enough you might detect that first nearly imperceptible movement – is the answer to the question Kate has asked me more than once: "How can you sit there so long – you hardly move! – staring endlessly at the very same picture?"

Time travel with old photographs

Two mini CDVs from Brighton

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From "Time and Again" by Jack Finney (1970):

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Time travel with old photographs

Two mini CDVs from Brighton

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From "Time and Again" by Jack Finney (1970):

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