Photo albums allow you to get a pretty good idea of the time they were taken, even if someone wasn’t labeling the photos with dates.
You can tell the 1900 – 1950s photos since they’re black and white. The 1960s show the rough beginnings of colour film. The quality of photos from the 1990s to 2010s is usually much better as the cost of good cameras came down. And today… well… it’s hard to tell since so few people seem to actually print photos anymore, and just store them on ‘the cloud’ and look at them on ‘a device.’
I came across a small photo album with what seemed to be just one trip, from the 1970s, that I took to England with my Mom and Dad.
1970s photos have a unique feel to them… like the colour quality was getting better, but since they’ve been in that album for almost 50 years that colour is starting to struggle, to look less vibrant, and more muddied. They tend to the ‘reddish’ in hue and since everyone stood way back to take them, the detail of the main item is usually hard to make out.
Regardless, they certainly didn’t fail to bring back a rush of memories, and help create a “mood” for that time of my life, much like what a cinematographer does with a movie’s tone.
One of the key images is of my Mom and her sister with my grandmother. As gramma looks like she’s getting a little older, this visit was probably the main reason for the trip across the ocean.
Like so many places in the British Isles, we were obviously close to the coast. I seem to be posed near the White Cliffs of Dover, and have found some unique sea weed on the beach.
One of the things that has stuck with me most over the years was our visit to Canterbury Cathedral. The church was originally built around 1070 AD, making it literally a thousand years old. In our current cheap and disposable age, building something that lasts this long is hard to imagine.
The Cathedral was added to over the centuries and luckily received only minor damage during the German bombings of World War II.
Those buried there include Thomas Beckett who was murdered by Knights in the church in 1170 after King Henry II expressed his frustration with the archbishop.
While it is showing its age in terms of the effects of time and pollution on its outer stone, it is still an amazing place to stand and imagine how people lived centuries ago.
In this photo, I’m actually to the right of the Christchurch entrance. If you look closely in the centre near the top you’ll see an empty spot in the stone work that looks like it’s missing something. There had been a statue of Christ, but it was destroyed in 1643. In 1990 it was replaced with a bronze replacement… only 300 years later.
I’ve included this wonderful photo from Wikipedia to allow you to see what it looks like today, and marvel at the improvement in camera resolution from the 1970s to 2018.
Even without an exact date on the photo album I am grateful someone took the time to photograph our trip and preserve it for me to visit again after such a long time. While the 1970s may have been a time of great change in the economy and politics, it offered such great luxury such as flying across an ocean and getting in touch with history and my roots.
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