burnt embers

More products from a recently acquired photo scanner – this time I scanned a childhood photo album. The album dates to a year-long trip we made to Europe; to England and Scotland when I was seven and then to the south of France where I turned eight. The album has photos from that trip, is not in the greatest of shape with some of the photos  gone, probably forever, some of them were loose, and so on. I put new corners (the black ones) on some photos, using the package of corners that was in the other other album. Now that was a nostalgic event, the taste of that glue bringing back lots of memories of photo corners, stamps and envelopes of old. Probably it was an animal based glue, ground up horse hooves or something similar.

I remember that I took some of those photographs like the ones of the Pont du Gard Roman aqueduct in Southern France.  But I find it hard to believe that my little Brownie camera, and my 7-year-old eye, could have captured the photo above, or the one second from the bottom. My mother took the terrific photo that is attached inside the back cover of me and my siblings, also on this trip, but the format is different – she had a fold out camera with a wonderful lens, I think from the 30s. So, I am inclined to say these shots are taken with my Brownie, and I am supposing that I took them. My parents don’t remember otherwise, so now that it is written it can become fact. The last photos “in” the album (the ones without corners) were taken by me, but were loose in the album, and as you can see, they were not cut. I think they are part of the same batch as the one above, or processed at the same time. I believe the processing was done in Britain and maybe also France. The photo album was purchased at Boots and I don’t think there were Boots stores in Edmonton, where we lived at that time.

To see the entire album in a book form, click on this link. You will find tools at that site for enlarging the view and I urge you to look as there are lots of photos. Even though most of them are lousy as a group the album becomes an interesting object. These can be classified as my first photographs since the camera was a present that I got for this trip. Whether I shot a roll at home before departure, I don’t know and can find no trace of it. I rather suspect I got the camera once we got off the ship in England.

(more…)