{minna vintage} – Jamaican Vacation, 1970
August 26, 2009
A lot of us are still on vacation, luxuriating in the sun, enjoying what’s left of the summer before the autumn season kicks in. I know. It’ll be gone in a second and it seems like it just got here! Appreciate it while you can. I thought I’d share a few family snapshots in Jamaica. Enjoy –
three brothers + parents & me
me at the sea | falls behind the house
at the beach
{minna vintage} – Score: granny-3, me-0
July 12, 2009
Occasionally I love to laugh at my grandmother-Winnifred’s tendency to walk down the aisle. Here’s a late-1970s snapshot of myself with cousins, as bridesmaids…in my grandmother’s second wedding somewhere in Boston, Massachusetts. Little did we know there would be a third one! Don’t worry, it’s not an Elizabeth-Taylor-situation…it’s just that all her husbands died before her. And I promise you there was no foul-play involved!
apparently I'm missing a tooth...
{minna vintage} – Mum’s Family, 1962
April 27, 2009
My mother was the first to leave the nest in her family and was horribly homesick while studying in London. There were no lines of communication easily accessible to them that wasn’t a major expense. There were no cellphones, email, twitter or facebook…just a simple telegram and the occasional call (when her family could travel to find a landline). This treasured snapshot of my granny Winnifred, aunt Erdine and uncles, Prince and Hammy in Barbados, made England feel more like “home.”
from Barbados with love...
{minna vintage} – My Grandfather, 1940s
March 15, 2009
Here’s an early 1940s photograph of my grandfather. When my grandmother was alive she was fond of telling me I was her favorite grandchild because we looked exactly alike. He died young, at 36, of heart failure, when my mother was only 8 years old -
my grandfather, early 1940s
I do treasure this photograph! The simplicity of just the chair, the subject and the background is stunning. My grandfather was a beautiful man. For some reason when I look at this picture, I imagine the scope of his life so vividly…his hardships, his triumphs, and his grief, knowing he would leave four small children behind with my grandmother.
As you know by now, I adore vintage photography and I’m a believer in sharing those restored and transferred images. With both the restored and original files on CD, I offer a DVD slideshow of the photographs in motion, which makes a terrific gift! Check out a slideshow of my parents 1966 Wedding.
With Easter, Passover, Mother’s Day, & Father’s Day holidays approaching, now is a great time to sort out your old photographs and finally commit them to a digital format. Your vintage photographs are most likely the only copies you own. They’re hidden away in an album or keepsake box somewhere and rarely make an appearance….kinda like the ‘good china’ in the china cabinet! Well, I say transfer them now! Share them with your loved ones.
minna slideshow – {Hazel + Austin – UK 1966}
January 28, 2009
The photos in my parents’ wedding album is my only proof they were once young.
All 25 of them.
The pair have no photos of themselves prior to their wedding. They are practical, thrifty survivalists…a mentality borne from their poor Caribbean upbringing. Only bare-bone necessities, please! They never saw the need for photos except on major occasions. Like weddings.
Many years later they regret not taking more photographs. I always seem to scramble for remnants of torn photos to piece together their moments. The scarcity of these images surely fuelled my obsession with vintage photographs. It’s one of the reasons I feel compelled to create still and moving images today.
On a recent visit to my parents’ house, I noticed their lovely wedding album was virtually destroyed. The wind-up music box rusted,
the vellum overlays ripped, the rubber-cemented photos were discolored, speckled & torn, and the silver-threaded box it was showcased in was duct-taped (apparently my father’s solution for repair). I knew I had to revive that album and give those photos a new kind of life. My parents, the non-sentimentalists they are, couldn’t care less when I carted their album off to perform surgery on it.
After the photo restoration, the response to their wedding photos, (all 25 of them), was quite different. Prior to this rebirth they never looked at their album. Now they replay it over and over again on their DVD slideshow.
So, I’m going to declare February RESTORATION MONTH!
If you have an old wedding album, childhood, family portraits, or any type of photos, bring them to me. Restoring & transferring your hard copies to digital files and sharing them with your loved ones is the only way to protect the longevity of your memories. If you have a wedding anniversary, birthday party, or mother/father holidays coming up, a digital DVD of your old photographs will make a terrific gift!
If you are unable to view slideshows in your feed reader, click here to view!
