Continuing with the Kodachrome slides my father shot in Europe in the mid-1950s (original story in this post), we remain in Germany.
According to my mother, Bamberg is known as Klein-Venedig (“Little Venice”) because of its canal, although Wikipedia suggests no canal but the River Regnitz and only a colony of fishermen’s houses from the 19th century along one bank of the river get that appellation. Here are a few snaps of the waterway, the middle one featuring my mother.
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.”
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.
A couple of London street shots from my father’s collection of Kodachromes from 1955-56. You can read the story of their digitization here. I really like the feel of the top image with its cool blues and grays and the backs of only a few people and no cars in the streets. A definite sense of urban desolation.
My mother poses on an empty pavement before the Houses of Parliament. Full story here.
Little changed today. the lorries are a bit different though. Story on these Kodachromes by my father in 1955-56 can be found here.
Looks to me like the Spur Rd approach to Buckingham Palace (above) and The Mall (below). Another of my father’s Kodachromes from 1955 or ’56 (see full story here). Note the absence of throngs of tourists or cars or even lanes painted on the road.
Returning to the Kodachromes my father shot back in the ’50s (see this post for the background on this project) we’ll start with some London street scenes. This one’s a fairly unremarkable tourist shot of Trafalgar Square but I rather like the brownish fog, evocative of a T S Eliot poem.
At a business conference for a few days a couple of weeks ago. More to come.
I think I’ve probably posted pictures like this before. Every time we get this kind of fog I’m tempted to take a picture of the taller buildings in the background disappearing into the mist.
