Close look at an iceberg in 1915

Saturday 11 April 2020

This remarkable photograph of an iceberg in the South Pacific Ocean was taken from the New Zealand Shipping Company's S.S. Remuera in July 1915. Considering that most passengers would have had vivid memories of the tragic sinking of the Titanic, which took place just three years earlier, it is rather surprising, and perhaps even foolhardy, that the Remuera steamed so close to this iceberg.

The above image has been scanned from a glass lantern slide, which could be projected using a 'Magic Lantern' projector. Magic Lanterns were the forerunners of 35mm slide projectors, and were in use from as early as the 17th century, up until the mid-20th century.

Icebergs were also very popular subjects for many of the real photo postcards that were sold to passengers making the journey to New Zealand from the UK. I have one such card, which was also photographed from the Remuera, in December 1913, less than two years after the Titanic disaster.

Several iceberg photo postcards are illustrated in my 2018 printed book, X8 - early New Zealand Shipping Company postcards and their photographers, which is available to purchase from this website: www.printerspie.co.uk/Books/Printed-Books/X8/X8.html

You can read more about the New Zealand Shipping Company on my other website: New Zealand Shipping Company records for genealogy

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

Close look at an iceberg in 1915

No comments

Facebook page

Search

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

Social Media

Total Page Views

Time travel with old photographs

Close look at an iceberg in 1915

No comments

Subscribe To

Facebook page

Search

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

Social Media

Total Page Views