Day: April 8, 2019

Bamberg

Continuing with the exploration of my father’s Kodachrome slides from the 1950s (see the original post here), we turn to Germany. Most of the upcoming images were taken in Bamberg, the town where my father was billeted in an apartment with my mother. They were there from approximately the summer of 1955 to the summer of 1956 with trips to England, Switzerland and around Germany in between.

We’ll start with a trio of images, I think all taken in the same spot, some kind of stone balcony overlooking the town, (perhaps at the Rose Garden?) with one portrait each of my mother, my father and my father with an army buddy my mother identified as Chet, “who came at the weekends and never left.”

Mom at Bamberg
Dad at Bamberg
Dad and Chet overlooking Bamberg

The bottom shot was a kind of monochrome greeny-yellow. I tried adding some warmth to it, not very successfully and made the sky bluish to add a little interest (winds up looking like one of those hand-tinted B&Ws). Needless to say, while I’ve been calling these “my fathers slides,” and it’s possible he set the camera up on a tripod, I think it unlikely he took at least 2 of these.

Brightening Brighton

And now a return to some of my father’s Kodachromes from the 1950s (see the full story here). Let’s finish off the UK with a couple of family shots from Brighton. In the first, my mother is perfectly radiant in prime blue and red while all about her is dreary, monochromatic gray (requiring absolutely no Photoshop fiddling on my part – this is virtually out of the camera). In the second shot, my father chomps on a piece of Brighton Rock, a bright pink log of pure sugar with the words Brighton Rock in red running right the way through from one end to the other so you see them wherever you are in the days-long it takes to get through it. Note that everyone at “the beach” is fully clothed.

Brighton, England