the graveyard of photos

S

scutt

Suspended / Banned
Messages
24
Edit My Images
Yes
well spent an hour queing at the local tip . finally it was my turn on top of all the rubbish was what i can only describe was a familys past history from old black/white to what looked like present day photos quite sad really. ever thought what might happen to yours , what you might like happen to yours .
 
Mine will probably go in a catastrophic hard disk failure.
 
It actually happens quite frequently, if an old person dies without family to clear their property the Council goes in and clears up and everything goes on the tip.

Literally their entire life gets thrown onto the back of a lorry and discarded :(.
 
What happens to all the online stuff?
 
Dave1 said:
It actually happens quite frequently, if an old person dies without family to clear their property the Council goes in and clears up and everything goes on the tip.

Literally their entire life gets thrown onto the back of a lorry and discarded :(.
Click to expand...

That happened in our house before we bought - chap inherited it off his mum, ran up a boat load of debt and did a flit so the repossession company cleared the place when we bought it. Felt so sad later when we learned that his brother lives down the road and wasn't allowed access to clear out his mum's personal possessions and everything was disposed of - we visited several times and if he'd have only asked we would have gladly arranged another visit through the agent so he could have collected it
 
One of the things I have saved from my Granddad are his old photos from all over the world.
 
Very recently I was clearing out our attic, when I happened across a shoebox full of old family pics, some going back 70 years !
It did get me thinking though; how many people bother actually printing their family "snaps"?
I think a lot of people have pics on phones, memory cards, hard drives etc, which may get viewed, but never get printed into a hard copy. Obviously when the media on which they are stored dies, the pics/memories die too.
There will be very few people in future years who, like I did, discover old family gems in a shoebox in the attic.

Cheers,
Gary
 
did show a family photo to my daughters not alot of interest i think there great

pic.jpg
 
scutt said:
did show a family photo to my daughters not alot of interest i think there great
Click to expand...

I agree, that is great.
It will be a shame to lose such historical pictures.
 
TinaC said:
This is also true of a lot of our written communications. Who writes letters these days as a means of chatting to friends and relatives.
Click to expand...

Very true.

Watched a program on TV recently about the digital age and whether in the future there will be a comparative 'gap' due to lack of hard copy.

Taking it to it's extreme it talked about how much we've learned about history because of very long lasting means of communication such as stone hieroglyphs and cave paintings etc
 
Also brings into sharp focus as to what happens to modern society's records if there was a cataclysmic earth event that meant no electricity, no access to more recent stuff and a dearth of skills to record the present. Time practice one's sketchbook skills just incase the digi camera and it's supporting technolgies fails.
 
artyman said:
Also brings into sharp focus as to what happens to modern society's records if there was a cataclysmic earth event that meant no electricity, no access to more recent stuff and a dearth of skills to record the present. Time practice one's sketchbook skills just incase the digi camera and it's supporting technolgies fails.
Click to expand...

all those old photos might be worth a fortune if like you said was to happen every thing ive taken is on the computer or disc nothing really in photo form
 
There was a report in the paper the other day about someone finding a load of pictures of the building on Tower Bridge on a tip.
They have been saved and are now in a museum
 
Back in the 80s when our local tip was just open ground I found an old album. A varied selection of photos from maybe the 20s and 30s. I'll scan them one day and put them up here. One day......
 
We found my Gt Uncle's photo album in my Dad's loft and it was full of photos taken during his time with the Royal Naval Air Force in 1917/18. Well over 100 photos of aircraft and pilots being trained to fight in WWI.

It was so amazing that I decided something had to be done with it so I set about researching his career, where each picture was taken, what the aircraft were and what he got up to (which turned out to be a major historic event, the first ever bombing raid launched off an aircraft carrier in 1918).

It all led to a huge project which resulted in me creating an amateurish looking website which subsequently drew accolades from historians, got featured in magazines and nominated for awards. Such is the power of "some old snaps" !
 
It all led to a huge project which resulted in me creating an amateurish looking website which subsequently drew accolades from historians, got featured in magazines and nominated for awards. Such is the power of "some old snaps" !
Click to expand...

Can you give us a link to said website??
 
My Dad has been researching his family tree for a few years now. As part of it, he decided he wanted to try a gather lots of pictures of all the people on the tree wherever possible. He's discovered some amazing things and now has thousands of photo's that no doubt would have just been dumped or hidden away somewhere eventually.
 
scutt said:
well spent an hour queing at the local tip . finally it was my turn on top of all the rubbish was what i can only describe was a familys past history from old black/white to what looked like present day photos quite sad really. ever thought what might happen to yours , what you might like happen to yours .
Click to expand...

should have taken a photo
 
WilliamC said:
url]http://www.casey.tgis.co.uk/web/dfc/dfc.htm[/url]
Click to expand...
Some brilliant photos there, and a great story - the upturned planes are my favourites :eek:

I have a suspicion that a lot of photos will get lost in future due to them only being stored on someone's hard drive, then if something happens to the person will anyone even think about retrieving the photos? Or will they even be able to get onto a password protected PC?
But a plus side of the digital age is a lot more people are taking a lot more photos and lots are being shared via social media, so historians in future years will probably be able to put together a picture of our times with relative ease.
 
scutt said:
well spent an hour queing at the local tip . finally it was my turn on top of all the rubbish was what i can only describe was a familys past history from old black/white to what looked like present day photos quite sad really. ever thought what might happen to yours , what you might like happen to yours .
Click to expand...

This part of Norfolk has a lot of retirees, towns like Downham Market could be fairly accurately described as God's Waiting Room.. I see box upon box of prints and slides in antique/junk shops, all for a pound or so per box. I have an occasional browse and I have been tempted to start collecting and setting up a seperate Flickr account just for found/vernacular images from sources like this. The last box of slides I looked through were all champion show dogs form the estate of a breeder.
 
Finding photos also highlights how useful it is when photos are labelled with who is in them, where they are and when they are.
 
scutt said:
did show a family photo to my daughters not alot of interest i think there great
Click to expand...

without context I can see why they would not be interested.

Who are these people, what are they celebrating?
 
simonw said:
without context I can see why they would not be interested.

Who are these people, what are they celebrating?
Click to expand...

these people are celebrating trawler race day in brixham s/devon there on a fishing smack. my grandfather was pouring the drink for his father . he lost his life in ww11 with alot of men from our town in scotland it was a bitter blow for our town to lose so many men in a small fishing port . the boat they lost there lives on was called hms saucy its story is on google .
 
TopBanana said:
Some brilliant photos there, and a great story - the upturned planes are my favourites :eek:
Click to expand...

Thanks Tim. Posting that link this morning forced me to look at the site again and realise just how appallingly dated it is so it just cost me some dosh buying modern web software and I've started working on updating it. Thanks TP, this forum doesn't only make you buy camera gear!
 
scutt said:
these people are celebrating trawler race day in brixham s/devon there on a fishing smack. my grandfather was pouring the drink for his father . he lost his life in ww11 with alot of men from our town in scotland it was a bitter blow for our town to lose so many men in a small fishing port . the boat they lost there lives on was called hms saucy its story is on google .
Click to expand...

And with that context it becomes something, without it it is just another snapshot.
 
I started work in the early sixties at moderately sized engineering factory for that time, 40 acres and about 5000 employees. During the first week or so we (That year’s intake of apprentices about a 100 or so, craft, technical and commercial.) were assembled to have our photographs taken, both individual and group. A man by the name of Lou Ballard took the pictures, he was the works photographer recording all of the day to day events and dealing with the press and such.
He would then have been a man of thirty perhaps. I got to know him quite well over the years, my interest in photography being key to this. Lou gave me my first lessons in developing and printing, the company had a large and well equipped lab.
About 29 years after my first photograph Lou took his last picture for the company. We were to be closed down and made redundant.
I was transport supervisor at that time and was put in charge of removing and overseeing the secure destruction of documents and other material deemed surplus or sensitive, this included photographs going back to the early part of the century. A 40year contribution from one man, who had dated and described each event on the rear of the prints.
I don’t know if Lou salvaged any of his work but I took some that where of interest to me like my father’s retirement in 1979 and some taken of various events over the years within the transport department. The rest, tonnes of the stuff, a complete history if you like of factory life from say 1900 to 1990 was loaded onto 32tonne arctic’s and removed to a secure incinerator to be sacrificed to the god of what had been.
If I could go back for just one hour before we loaded the lories, if only, if only, if only.
 
Last edited:
Sure. Just to make it clear this is a not-for-profit website (before mods get excited), it's also now rather old and desperately in need of an update. It may well not work properly on modern browsers either! Still, here ya go:
Click to expand...

Thanks for that, some great images on show with a fantastic story.
 
bulldog5988 said:
Thanks for that, some great images on show with a fantastic story.
Click to expand...

Thanks Bulldog, I have now just published v.1 of the updated the site which has had me burining the midnight oil for the last 3 days. It's going to keep me away from the camera getting this thing finished but it was well overdue! Same link as given above.
 
On the topic of the lack of hard data, I reread 1984 again recently, and I remember when I first read it that with computers it actually seemed a lot more likely to happen, rather than having to recreate the document, you just have to re-type it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top