THE FAMILY ALBUM

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4185, 13 September 1939, Page 10

THE FAMILY ALBUM

PHOTOGRAPHY’S CENTENARY. The disappearance from the average household of the family album of portraits is much to be regretted, and when one contemplates the collection of more or less current photographs that are stuffed into drawers and pigeonholes one realises that there was something to be said for the Victorian method of preserving them. If we searched our lumber rooms and recovered these old allbums (which somehow no one seems to have the heart to burn),, many of us could unearth material which might well he worth a place in the fine Exhibition of a Hundred Years of Photography, which opened in London recently. It is quite impossible in these days of the cinema and the studio photograph to imagine the excitement aroused a century ago, when, Daguerre and Neipce demonstrated to the French Academy of Arts and Sciences their achievement in securing an image on an i dised silver plate. The photographs of our ancestors, posed with unnatural stiffness, in ludicrously artificial surroundings, date, at earliest, from the fifties, when the collodion process was introduced. But it was not until much later that the portrait photographs that our old albums contain became really popular. The lens has developed enormously in the interval. A five minutes’ exposure was not unheard of in those “look-out-for-the-canary” days. An exposure of a thousandth of a second success today to catch the lineaments and gesture of the “sitter,” who, thanks to the telescopic lens, may be racing between wickets on a cricket pitch a hundred yards away. The whole history of photography is told in this exhibition.