I've always enjoyed going through my dad's old photos from when he was a young man in the 50s, along with the large collection of his cartoons documenting the family's life from as far back as the 60s (when my older half-sister was born), but it wasn't until my mother inherited a box of even older photos from her mother that I began to fixate on antique photos (I hesitate to use the word vintage, it can be - and is - applied to so much now that it's lost a lot of meaning to me). Not the process - I never went for photography in school - but the aesthetic, which greatly inspired me during my last year at uni.
Now, I haven't done much work since I left Montreal, my current apartment is tiny and London rent is too high for me to rent anything beyond a home, and I've given myself the excuse that as long as I'm studying
something art related it's ok if I don't pick up a pencil or brush ... for the time being, anyway. What I do try to do, however, is I keep my eyes open for old photos (and as time goes on, I find myself attracted to contemporary photography with a similar aesthetic, but I won't be getting into that here, at least not now), either on the web, or IRL (Thursday antiques market is a treasure trove).
One site that has a great selection of high quality images is
Shorpy Photoblog. Their images are mostly from the 20s and 30s and they're mostly professional images of such good quality that they at times look contemporary.
Another good source is Flickr. I learned about
The Library of Congress' photostream through a
friend's blog. The National Library of Congress is the US national library (based in Washington, DC), and are sharing their images through Flickr to make their images more accessible to the public. Their images vary much more in quality (though the digital copies are top notch) and often have crop marks or captions, which add to the aesthetic IMO.
The aesthetic I keep referring to is the lack of clarity, the haziness, that occurs physically through the older photo processes and psychologically thanks to the effect photography has on our memory. Even though we have no memories of these older images, we look at them as a record of a moment and compare them to our own photos of our own memories. These older photos belong to someone else's memories and I, anyway, can't help but try to recreate it in my own mind - reality doesn't look like this to me, so what would it have looked like really? The uncertainty of old photographs, I believe, tap into our sense of the sublime - that part of our aesthetic sense that has to grasp something conceptually that we know we can never fully grasp - and the pleasure we get in the unknown.
An interesting net toy is the
Vintage Photo Converter. This Japanese application lets you upload your photos and then "converts" them into an image that looks like it's "over 100 to 150 years old." It's actually quite fun to experiment with because the effect isn't bad at all. As a result you realize what makes an old photo isn't just the effect but the composition, poses, props, etc.
You can use it to play with that expectation of memory and understanding of what a contemporary photograph should look like. But there are many other better or more interesting ways of getting a similar effect, such as using an old camera, a polaroid, a lomo, playing with image copying (which degrades the image quality), etc. I could go on and on, but then the post will grow into something else, and nobody will ever want to navigate through it all. Besides, the more I hold back the more posts I'll have for the future!
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