Back in time

Still playing around with my Still Life table and gathering up a whole hoard of 'stuff' with which to populate it. (Some things work better than others).  Hidden away in a cardboard box in the shed next to my parents' house I found a collection of magazines - about a dozen or so copies of SLR Camera from the '70s, when my brother and I had a standing order for our favourite mag. They have the usual mix of advertising, gear tests, technical articles and letters.  Not too many adverts, which I think is one of the things we liked about SLR Camera (compared to AP, for example, which seemed to be full of ads of one sort or another).  It's interesting just how many editions featured pretty girls in various states of undress...used, of course, to illustrate an article about lighting or something.  I was going to say 'used in the pretence of illustrating something about lighting' but that could be viewed as cynical - although I think it's fair to say that the camera scene was predominantly male in those days and that editors weren't slow in realising that pretty girls on the front cover sell copy.  Anyway, as a teenage lad growing up in the Northern Irish countryside with no females near my own age within about 30 miles (or so it seemed) it helped my understanding of the differences between the male and the female of the human species, so I wasn't complaining.  But the main reason for getting the magazine was, of course, the gear!  It was the days of the Nikon F2, Canon F1, Contax RTS and of course my favourite, the Olympus OM-1.  I shall return to SLR Camera in a future post, but for now, back to the box of magazines...

Hidden underneath the SLR Cameras were a few copies of Paris Match dating from 1965.  I've no idea how these ended up in my mum's shed, as neither my mother or father were anywhere near France in 1965 (by that stage they had two young boys to look after).  I know my father travelled extensively all over Europe in his bachelor days, and my parents honeymooned in Paris but that was in 1960.  I wondered if they might have had a standing order for Paris Match but thinking about it, I very much doubt it, since money was tight enough in those days.  I shall ask my mum if she knows...

"The desperate start of suicide pilots"

The Paris Match magazines are special editions, printed 20 years after the end of the war - so there are articles about Japanese Kamikaze pilots and Pearl Harbour, complete with some rather impressive photographs...like these ones:

That photographer had nerves of steel, presumably battle-hardened.  I guess there really was no place to hide out there...

Aerial photograph of ship going down - some poor souls clinging on the side of the ship, trying for a soft landing and others already in the water.  I suspect the chance of survival was close to zero.

What a great piece of photojournalism...the contrast between the wounded man in the Church/Makeshift Hospital in the Philippines and the praying women

This Japanese plane is about to hit the ship...and the photographer.  I suppose there was little point in keeping your head down in those circumstances, so might as well take a photograph...

There is no mention of the photographers of these shots in the magazine (that I could find, anyway) - and rather bizarrely, the rest of this particular magazine is devoted to articles about the watchmaker Raymond Cartier and Prince Charles playing polo.  A strange combination.

So I borrowed the magazine for my Still Life table - which now seems rather a lame affair in the context of Kamikaze pilots and the horrors of the war in the Pacific...

HP5+ via the Nikon FM3a and Vivitar 35-85mm lens.  On Ilford Warmtone fibre paper - toned in sepia for the lighter tones and selenium for the lower tones. The phone was our house phone when I was growing up, so 1960s or maybe '70s depending when we actually got a line installed.  Our number in those days was simply 'Coleraine 2172'.  Nowadays it would be something like +44 (0)28 7034 2172.  That's a younger version of my mum in the photograph and then a variety of artefacts which I thought would suit the period.  I was rating the HP5+ at 200 iso and shooting at f/8 which allowing for film reciprocity meant an exposure of 11s.