Spitalfields Nippers

Monday 3 November 2014

Spitalfields Nippers by Horace Warner (Published by Spitalfields Life Books)

Around 1900, photographer Horace Warner took a series of portraits of some of the poorest people in London - creating relaxed, intimate images that gave dignity to his subjects and producing great photography that is without comparison in his era.

Only seen by members of Warner’s family for more than a century, almost all of these breathtaking photographs are published here for the first time.

This unique collection of pictures revolutionises our view of Londoners at the end of the nineteenth century, by bringing them startlingly close and permitting us to look them in the eye.

Link: Spitalfields Nippers by Horace Warner.
Link: Spitalfields Life (blog)

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

Spitalfields Nippers

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

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Time travel with old photographs

Spitalfields Nippers

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

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