The Limbo Connection's photos with the keyword: old photograph

Early 1950s. By no means did everyone have access to a camera. Those who did were careful before clicking the shutter; film and processing (in black-and-white of course) was expensive and every penny counted. You needed a bright day for photography, and a steady hand. Amazingly, the generation who knew how to load roll film migrated in hordes to the Kodak Instamatic a few years later. Why?

A Limbo Lockdown Production™.

A photograph which I bought on eBay. It was not the best of compositions; something like a haystack in the background blended in with the girl's hair disconcertingly. With the aid of the simple editing tools in the Paintbrush application, I attempted to tidy it up. The original photograph was printed on Kodak Velox paper, a very slow printing paper producing a blue-black image suitable for contact printing. As the original print measures 3.25 x 4.25 inches it is reasonable to suppose the negative came from 118 type roll film such as a Box Brownie might need, or a Kodak Model 3 or a Hawk-Eye. All this helps to date the photograph, but the best indicator is on the reverse which has a repeat motif of ‘Kodak/Velox/Paper' in three lines. That dates it to sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, unless the developer was using old stock. Kodak discontinued that paper in 1968. Kodak advertised Velox as ‘the only photographic paper made exclusively for amateur negatives’. The imperfections on this particular print indicate it was not made by a laboratory striving to maintain a business reputation. Later I rendered it infrared via a filter effect, and now I have added a Daguerreotype effect in the Picmonkey editor. Collections of photographs which once meant something to somebody are a staple of house clearances. They are bought in auctions and sold online.

Everyone smoked. Nobody had pet insurance. Life was punctuated by poverty and world wars.

A girl. A smile. A camera. Click. Later: A black-and-white print (No name, no details). Much later: The black-and-white print On eBay. Sold. (No name, no details). The girl - Who knows?

1. Place photograph on rim of time machine 2. Set time machine in motion 3. Photograph will drop into vortex of time machine 4. When time machine ceases spinning, it will be 1987 5. If photograph flies off rim of time machine the motion of time will be reversed and precise future date will be random 6. On no account put photographs of world leaders past or present on rim of time machine as dire consequences may ensue Nikon D2Xs and Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AF-D. 100 ISO, f/4.5, 1/100th.

The original owners of old photographs saw no need to inscribe names on the back. They knew who the people were. I will make an educated guess and say I think this is a likeness of Alice Fisher of Poole Keynes, born 1878, who married a man called Mansell and lived in London.