jeromemartin.ca

Quality of Vintage Photographs

My mother used box cameras with fixed focus, shutter speed and f/stop. They were truly point and shoot cameras, designed to create reasonable photographs in sunny conditions. My mother never worried about adjusting her camera: she asked her subjects to stand in bright sunlight and made sure that the sun was behind her. In many of the photographs which she made of me I was squinting or shielding the sun from my eyes with my hand.
Her photographs were of good quality, partly due to Kodak's combination of film speed, shutter speed and lens opening and the latitude of the black and white film she used.
However, there's another reason why snapshots from the late part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century were of high quality: film size. Some of my mother's negatives were 2 1/2 inches by 2 1/2 inches (620 film) while others were 2 1/2 inches by 4 1/4 inches (presumably 616 film).
These negatives are extremely large compared to 35mm film which became the standard in the 1950s and '60s. Of course some photographers continue to use medium format film (120 film is the same size as 620 film) and large format (4" x 5") film because of its quality, but early photographers like my mother used such film routinely because that was all that was available and it, like the box camera, was cheap and easy to use.
Large negatives are inherently high in quality if they were exposed correctly. The detail in the negatives made using box cameras is incredible, considering that the cameras had inexpensive, fixed lenses. The prints made from these films were usually contact prints, not enlargements.
If you're fortunate enough to have 'old' photographs and negatives in your collection treat them with the respect and care they deserve. You may wish to scan the photographs or negatives or enlarge the negatives. You'll be amazed at the quality which results from large negatives, even if they have been ignored or mistreated.

Our Photographic History: Negatives and Vintage Prints

Photographs are precious objects to photographers, archivists and historians – and they are also among the most prized possessions of any family, certainly the first objects that we would save from a burning house. If we were to lose the photos of our great-grandparents how would we or our children ever remember them?
Your parents likely have or had albums of photographs and boxes of negatives. If you are fortunate someone will have identified the people in the photographs and the years they were made. Perhaps someone wrote on the back of the photographs with pencil, a relatively harmless process, which has now provided context for the photographs.
Most of us have at least some photographs that are in boxes, not organized and not identified. Someone at some time will look at these and decide which photos should be kept and which should be discarded. Ideally this person should be the photographer or a family member who has information on the people and places in the photographs. Too often such boxes of photos are eventually discarded because no one has information on them.
Archivists and photographers may see value in family photographs even if there is no information about them. They contain information about society and our history and, as such, are valuable.
A friend of mine told me years ago that he when he received his photos from the processor he discarded the negatives. 'Why would I need them? I have the photographs.' Of course in order to make new prints one should have the negatives. I have reprinted many of my Mother's photographs from the 1940s and 1950s; I have made prints that were larger and higher in quality than the original prints which she received from the mail-order processor. But I've kept those prints as well.
Many years ago a large local museum discarded hundreds of original photographs printed by the photographers who made them; museum employees had made prints from the negatives and, in their opinion, had no reason to keep the prints. Vintage prints are often made using papers and processes which are not available now and hence have qualities that modern printing cannot produce.
I suggest that we should preserve both prints and negatives using proper archival materials. You may be able to buy archival storage boxes, envelopes and negative locally. I've bought such products from Light Impressions. They provide excellent products and information about how to use them.
I've used Print File products to store my negatives and transparencies. They are available at most photo stores.
You may have boxes of prints and boxes of negatives (yours or your mother's or your grandfather's) in your basement. Now is the time to provide proper storage for them and to write about them (use pencil only on the back of photographs, or provide information within albums or on separate documents).
I've got more work to do on some family photographs and on my own work. In the meantime I would be interested in your comments and suggestions on preserving and working with our photographic legacy.

Understanding Our Photographic History

'Show me some pictures, please.'
'Sure, Aidan, I'll be right back.'
My wife and I were chatting with our grandson this afternoon. He loves photographs and is always keen on seeing images of himself and his family. We got the box of photographs with his name on it and showed him about twenty images before our time was up and he had to go to bed.
Aidan, who is four but would really like to be eight since that is his favourite number, lives in Vermont, which is about 2,500 miles from where we live. We visit him in person several times a year, but most of the time – including today – we talk to him in real time video on our computer. As we open the box of photographs with his name on it he gets very excited and gives a running commentary on the photos as we hold them close to the camera.
'That's me and Emily.'
'That's our whole family.'
'That's me at your house.'
Aidan is following a family tradition: he loves photographs. We create small albums for him and for his sister Emily on their birthdays and at Christmas, just as we have done for other members of our family, young and old. I think that his photographs are amongst his favourite possessions, almost as important as his cars and trucks.
I did not have photographs of my own when I was four, but I remember looking at our family albums of black and white photos of my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents, and me. Looking at the family albums was a privilege, reserved for Sunday afternoons or evenings when friends or relatives came calling.
We lived on a farm in southwestern Saskatchewan. While we did not have a lot of resources we were able buy film for my mother's Brownie 620 camera. She photographed her children, friends and relatives in the farmyard mostly on special occasions. The photos went into black albums and the negatives went into boxes. I now have all of the albums and all of the negatives.
Our photographs of our parents and other family members help us to see and understand them in ways that would not be possible if we relied only on stories and letters. I recently scanned a studio photograph, a rather small image, of my grandparents and my father (at the age of two) made in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, in 1915. As the large image appeared on my computer screen I noticed that my grandfather was holding my father's small hand gently in his large, weathered hand. I had not seen this detail in the small print. My grandfather died before I was born, but this photo – especially the scanned version – has allowed me to know him in a very special way.
Over the next days and weeks I'll be writing about preserving and understanding our photographic history, which consists of old photographs and negatives as well as contemporary prints and the digital images which are so easy to make but so hard to manage.
In the meantime please visit my photographic site. You'll find some of my photographic history there.