Slip Slidin' Away #1
On discovering boxes of old transparencies.
You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin’ away— Paul Simon
When I first started taking photography relatively seriously I favoured a second-hand Nikon FG and Kodachrome as my materials of choice.1 For about a decade, from the late 1980s to early 2000s, that’s what I predominantly used. I loved posting the envelope to the Parisian processing depot and waiting for a similar one, containing the yellow plastic box of 36 mysteries, to plop through the letterbox about a week later. For a time I lived in a flat beneath a professional photographer. He told me later that he was always a bit jealous of my frequent Kodak deliveries.2 There was certainly something blissfully amateur about my approach and nothing much has changed since, apart from the materials.
Not long ago, I retrieved boxes of slides from the loft with a plan to get them scanned. The first lot were those I’d taken in the USA on a year-long Fulbright Teacher Exchange. I’ve posted a few of these under the title Let’s Keep It Nice.
Let's Keep It Nice #1
In July 1994, my partner and I began our Fulbright Teacher Exchange adventure. We both swapped our lives as English teachers in south east London comprehensive schools for a year living and working as high school English teachers in Austin, Texas. We were still relatively young, childless, with a newish mortgage but very few commitments. We didn’t choos…
This week, I’ve finally got around to scanning a few more. They are a mixed bag. I was pretty ruthless in only keeping images that I was interested in and ditching the rest. Consequently, I don’t have complete sets of pictures and my filing was woeful. It’s been a bit like rummaging through a charity shop bargain bin to be honest.
Slip Slidin’ Away (with apologies to Paul Simon) is therefore a new series of posts featuring some of these scans. Since I’m not sure about dates and pretty vague about subjects, I share them here without captions and in small bursts, largely for my own amusement.
I recently wrote about revisiting Florence after 23 years, having led a school trip there in 2002. I’m sharing a set of pictures here that were taken in Vienna on another Art History Study Tour with sixth formers from my school, I think in 1998.3 It was an interesting trip with all the usual shenanigans. I remember tramping across the city to the Belvedere, only to find it closed for renovation. The students found the food served in our local café fairly inedible, especially the cheese-filled sausages and they repeatedly attempted to sneak out of the hotel in the dead of night to the nearby reggae club, with some success. Fun times!
It’s amazing to think that these students are now in their mid-40s. Also, is it possible that the Viennese all wore overcoats and homburgs in 1998? Some of the pictures could be stills from The Third Man, if it had been shot in colour.
Tempus fugit.
Auf wiedersehen.
These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.
My parents had bought me a Nikon EM for my 21st birthday. I wish I still had it!
At some point, I switched from a film camera and slides to early digital cameras.
wonderful photos of /from Vienna. And if I may, they remind me of the way I photograph. Really really enjoyed this "happenstance".
These are fun. My favourites are the Bruegel and the bus interiors.
I recently purchased an inexpensive kit to ‘scan’ old slides and negatives using a macro lens I already have. I’m expecting to be disappointed — not just with the images, but with all the dust spots I’ll have to remove. Fortunately, the camera shop where I bought the kit also has a decent scanner.