Many of the posts on this site refer to the poetry portfolio that I created for a MA dissertation back in 2017. The sequence of ekphrastic poems, which were titled 'Still', originated with the discovery of a box of colour positive slides at a yard sale. As previously discussed, the slides were taken by a very competant photographer and were a mixture of holiday snaps of a small family and lustrous landscapes taken in Scotland, Ireland and Europe. At the time of writing, the set which included the family grouping stuck a very poignant chord with myself and reminded me very powerfully of my own parents and my own beach holidays. After I eventually completed the poetry, I stored the slides with the family away from the landscape shots and did not really engage with them very much over the next few years. As the slides are 35mm glass, they are notoriously tricky to replicate or scan, without specialised equipment, so a lot of the landscapes went back in the box after a cursory inspection and only the most intruiging scenes were kept back for further examination. Over the next few years, I tried an optical camera attachment to re-photograph some of them, used an iphone app to scan them and eventually found a small hand scanner which prepared 10mb jpeg reproductions of the slides. This proved useful for my needs and I subsequently moved on to other projects.
Most recently, advances in A.I powered image manipulation and recovery in programmes such as Photoshop and Lightroom have meant that previously unrecoverable photographs can be restored to a good or sometimes excellent level of clarity.
With this in mind, I decided to revisit the slides, which have a lot of my most favourite landscape shots in them, to see if it would be possible to recover an image with a view towards printing it at a large scale.
All of the scans are fair quality, but the slides are shrouded in dust and dirt, which shows up on the scan. I went through all the Scotland set and was excited to discover a single shot which had been labelled simply 'Distant Hills' - which after I scanned it, I recognised as the Sound of Mull and the
Musdile Island Lighthouse, which I had photographed myself on a visit to the Highlands. Spurred on by this discovery, I brought out the rest of the slides, including the beach grouping, which were in a box labelled 'Ireland 1966' and individually labelled 'Castlerock'.
It was the Castlerock sequence, which had originally moved me, as the images of the dad playing with his young son in the surf, trousers rolled to the knees, had reminded me so strongly of my own father and a very special photograph from around the same time, taken at West Kirby beach.
It had been these three shots of the dad in the waves, which had inspired the final poem
'Time and Tide'.
While I was writing the poetry, I speculated on who may have taken the photographs out of the two adults and wondered if it may have been the lady in the picture, as one of the sets of slides came in a mailing box with a womans name and address on it. After scanning the group shots, its interesting to note the expressions on the people in the photograph. In both the example at the head of this post and the second image below, both father and son are gazing at the camera directly, the father clearly relaxed and the little boy pulling faces. In the first shot, the mum is fairly non-chalant about the sitting, but in the second one, her gaze has shifted slightly and she seems to be regarding something to the right of the camera - perhaps someone else? If the camera was positioned on a tripod with a timer, maybe she was distracted by waiting to see if it worked correctly and the image catches that instant as she waits for the camera to fire between shots?
Seeing the family so much more clearly now, it is tempting to try and discover the actual identity of the pair, once more, although a previous search on the address on the developers mailing box had revealed the house being up for sale, suggesting that the materials at the yard sale had been the result of a house clearance.
