Out of the Box!

Out of the Box! - Vestry House Museum, London, 2012

As an artist who uses photography a great deal, I was intrigued to discover on a visit to Vestry House Museum that Walthamstow has strong links with the history of camera manufacture. Years ago I had started an arbitrary collection of vintage cameras, stopping only when they began to gather dust. Re-examining them, I was delighted to find that I already had two Walthamstow-made cameras; a Houghton & Butcher box camera and a Ful-Vue. It was inevitable then that I should make an exhibition proposal of contemporary snapshots using vintage and locally-made cameras.

The cameras I owned however, were not in working order so I spent some time sourcing ‘new’ ones on eBay. My first purchase was a Selfix 420, available from 1946, that takes eight 6 x 9cm negatives. My favourite ended up being the Selfix 16-20 that takes sixteen negatives 6 x 4.5cm and was produced from around 1950.

Over that summer (one of the wettest on record) I rediscovered the joys and frustrations of film photography especially the anticipation of waiting for negatives to be processed and discovering what the results are like only to find that some of my attempts were less successful than the Ensign adverts had me believe possible.

Walthamstow’s connection with the history of popular photography and the incredible range of cameras produced there is fascinating plus the standards of manufacture were also inspirational. It was sometimes hard to believe that I was using cameras assembled over half a century ago.

Out of the Box! evolved into my celebration of Walthamstow’s photographic heritage. I not only exhibited my own recently taken images but a selection from the museum's own archive of donated photos, and my own 'found' snapshots, those blurred, cropped and incomprehensible photographs stored for posterity in tins and shoeboxes.

As the documentary images below show, the exhibition included items from the museum's Ensign archive alongside photographs, framed and exhibited under headings inspired by texts on the their backs in the spirit of early photography, and accurately named to reflect their true contents e.g. 'just a bit cut off' and 'our dog Jack'.

The images shown here are a selection from the combination of archive (from the museum's collections), ‘found’ and new images, the latter all taken with locally-made cameras. As the museum's original prints could not be shown all were scanned and digitally reprinted so it was not immediately obvious which were new and which vintage images. As with the original exhibition, I have not made explicit here either which are ‘found’ images and which the ones I took.