Another stray negative I found- I can never seem to place these kinds of photographs in a particular decade as I feel like everyone in the Australian country side dressed about the same from 1930-1960
Brendon Kearns
photoweblog
Tag: found photography (page 2 of 2)
Another stray negative I found while digging through a box of prints this past weekend- if you look closely there’s some graffiti written into the rock behind her, I tried to play around with the image to see if I could make it clearer and decipher but had no luck
After moving flats I’ve had a long delay in my posting ability- it took two weeks before I could get a technician out to setup my flat with net access, but in the meantime I’ve been steadily collecting negatives from in and around Sydney.
This is one of my favorite finds thus far for its sheer weird factor- if you look closely she has her glasses placed on the dog. I found a few less well composed and more over exposed shots of these two and their dogs so I’m guessing this was just someone messing around with a flash.
Later while scanning I found I had picked up this negative of the same women- I had pulled them out singularly from a box of mixed prints, based on the negatives themselves I hadn’t realise the two shots were related although I think its interesting to see them in two very different contexts; I’m assuming this last frame was from a funeral.
If you look closely at the photo above you can see its the same guy and girl from the previous set I found
All the shots above are off another roll I found at the same second hand shop as the wedding photos I scanned in last night- the stock this time was Kodak Tri X Pan Film.
The promiently shown car looks like a Ford Zephyr Mark II which would place the photos sometime after 1956.
I’m still lost as to the actual location of these or the previous roll although the license plate of the car does indicate New South Whales- it has the look of a new suburb at the time since the houses are all next to each other yet in the middle of nowhere. They’re an odd mix of country and suburban- heavy on the grape vine covered overhangs. As an American, it seems odd to me that with all that empty space surrounding them they would choose to build their houses literately a few yards or meters apart but maybe they were going for more of a town or village feel as everyone in the photos seems fairly close.
I cut the remaining two frames out of the negative strip and placed in the thickest book I could fine (a yet to be read copy of “The Pale King”) for a day to see if I could manage to flatten out the bends with no real effect.
But, I was able to fit them into a scanning holder flat enough to get an alright scan- these shots are arnt as interesting in composition as the previous two but might offer a little in terms of insight into context.
It turns out that these are likely Hmong people– possibly from Lao, Yunnan or Vietnam. I’m hoping that by posting these last few frames some more clues will emerge that might confirm their location and if they were wartime photos of people on the move.
Special thanks to Dr. Neil Maclean, Linda Connor, Holly High and the rest of the Sydney University Department of Anthropology for their help in identifying the people, place and time.
These negatives were wrapped inside a small piece of folding paper stamped with “Milson’s Photo Service 5 Hunter Street Sydney”. There doesnt appear to be any date or indication of the film stock but I would guess they’re from the 1930’s or 40’s based on dress and style.
They also came with prints of the above photos and a small set of 2 x 2 squares featuring some Australian landscape shots but these all seemed fairly average. I thought about scanning them in but without the actual negative I dont think they would come out to much.
The paper they came in has the name of Miss Poole on the back along with the cost of the developing and printing which came to $4.
I recently stumbled across a crumpled up roll of medium format film at a second hand shop in Sydney; after holding it up to the light it looked like some fairly old images from somewhere in Asia- my guess is China but really have no idea.
The film stock was Ilford FP4 Fine Grain so that would place the shots between the years of 1968-1990 according to my brief wikipedia search.
The negatives were a bit scratched and since they were folded many times over, these were the only two frames I could cut out of the strip that didnt have a bend through them. Most of the other frames dont appear to contain much of interest, mostly just shots of a twin prop plane flying through the air- there’s one more of the woman with child but its pretty beat, I’m going to see if I can get it clean up and scanned in over the coming weeks.
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