Like many, I was intrigued by the story of Vivian Maier, the New York-born nanny of French ancestry who bequeathed such a remarkable treasure trove of street photographs, mainly from the 1950s and 1960s.
It brought to mind my own early teenage years in Edinburgh’s south side. In 1957 I bought a Kodak Brownie camera, which was used mostly to take family images, all of which, regrettably, have since been lost.
Seeing the extent of Maier’s work made me think more of the value of street photography as historical archive, enabling future generations to see bygone areas of towns (and their inhabitants as they were then). The two photographs below were taken only fifty-odd years apart, yet it underscores the changes that can take place in such a short space of time.
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| Heriot Mount, Edinburgh, 1959 (photo courtesy Edinburgh City Libraries) |
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| Heriot Mount, Edinburgh, 2012 (Olympus XA, Ilford FP4 125, F16, 1/125) |
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