Here's a nice story. A guy who works at a recycling center in the Shetland Islands, Paul Moar, discovered two bags of old slides turned in to be discarded. They documented local life on the Islands 30 and 40 years ago. A local history buff, Paul realized they were "a little bit of treasure."
The Shetlands, which are part of Scotland, are the northernmost outpost of the British Isles—about as far north as Anchorage, Alaska—and have a population of just 23,000 people, half of whom live within reach of the capital and the largest town, Lerwick, where the recycling center is.
The photographer turned out to be Nick Dymond, who used to run birding and wildlife tours on the Islands and was "just doing a clear-out." He has photographed around the world and his pictures of home didn't seem so special to him. He doesn't even own a slide projector to look at his old slides any more.
They've turned out to be a "sensation" to local residents, who feel like they've been given a window into their own pasts. Many are avidly identifying the people and places in the photos. For Shetlanders it's been a bright spot in troubled times.
Nick gave his permission for the photos to be digitized and put online, and for the 300-odd slides eventually to be donated to the Shetland Museum and Archives.
A fine feel-good photo-related story. The short article is called "A Glimpse of a Bygone Life on Scottish Islands, Plucked From the Trash," and it's at the world's greatest photography magazine, AKA the New York Times. Many readers tipped me about it. Thanks to all.
Mike
Paul Moar: "Hi Mike, thanks for your kind words and your little blog about it is actually much better than some of the newspaper articles I've seen! As someone commented to me, 'the right person was in the right place at the right time.' It's been nice to see it give a little uplift in theses trying times. :-) "
Book o' This Week:
In honor of Black History Month, an eloquent Black voice on the issue of race. Pulitzer-prizewinner Isabel Wilkerson's much-lauded book Caste: The origins of our discontents is a good book for our historical moment.
The above link takes you from TOP to Amazon. Here's the book at Amazon Canada. "As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases."
Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Dillan: "This is what photography is all about. These photos have meaning. May they serve as a lasting record of the inhabitants and way of life of the people of the Shetland Islands. By the way, with so many of your articles, you keep reminding me to take more photos of people. It's hard to do at the moment, but when all this is over, I've got to try harder."
Mike replies: I agree, but with a caveat, which is that these photos are of people still well within living memory. Once people are outside of living memory, interest in most of them goes down quite a bit. It's because these photographs remind so many Shetlanders of their own history, and people they themselves remember, that they resonate so much. Another half century and most of the interest might be academic rather than emotional.
This is one reason I think stories are so helpful and that stories with pictures go together so well. Take for instance the mini-story of the person feeding the lamb. Doesn't it enrich the picture? It does for me. Helps me "see" his personality, almost literally, in that it "changes" the look on his face by reinforcing the meaning of his expression. A story can be as simple as a caption.
Thomas Mc Cann: "John Hinde was a famous postcard photographer and publisher in Ireland. Every tourist shop had his postcards for sale on display in racks. The advent of the internet killed the business. We were tasked with removing the contents of the company's premises. We had to dispose a very large number of filing cabinets filled with his original slides. Perhaps they had been digitised. Who knows."
Mike replies: I absolutely hate stories like that...much better when something like the Nick Dymond/Paul Moar story happens. Remember my post "The Trough of No Value"? That wall of glass plate negatives haunts me. There were masterpieces in there.
Uh uh. No pictures with fiction please - fiction is much more powerful in one's head.
Posted by: Patrick Dodds | Thursday, 11 February 2021 at 02:39 PM
Speaking of stories, Mike, and their "enrichment" of pictures: this opens up creative strategies in which the pairing leads to a poetic creation, not necessarily intended as factual in the documentary sense. Any words that inform our viewing of a picture modify its perception. Which opens a can of worms about pictures that "stand alone" versus others that "need" the accompaniment of language.
Posted by: Antonis | Thursday, 11 February 2021 at 03:07 PM
Another Shetland photographer:
https://www.johncarolan.co.uk/about/
Posted by: Oren Grad | Thursday, 11 February 2021 at 03:21 PM
The surprising thing, to me, is that this event made it to the NYT.
Posted by: Rob Campbell | Thursday, 11 February 2021 at 03:40 PM
Well, from a photo nerdy perspective, I'm interested in knowing what slide film these were shot on. The color palette doesn't look like Kodachrome or Ektachrome. My guess would be Agfachrome, but it's been a while since I've looked at any slide film at all. Anyone else have a guess?
Posted by: Bill Tyler | Thursday, 11 February 2021 at 08:36 PM
The locale reminds me of the evocative large format photography that Paul Strand did on the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, back in the 1950s, though, of course, the two photographers' styles are very different. I daresay, Nick Dymond's's subject choices are far more special to the locals in the Shetlands. As an aside, I wonder if any of his subjects actually got to view Paul Strand's large format contact prints?
Thank goodness Mr. Dymond's slides weren't "recycled", as the New York Times put it.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/scotland-blog/2012/sep/20/scotland-photography-paul-strand
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=paul+strand+scotland&atb=v206-1&iax=images&ia=images
Posted by: Mani Sitaraman | Thursday, 11 February 2021 at 10:38 PM
My Great Great Uncle William Brown plyed his trade as a doctor on the Shetlands in he early 1900's. He was a keen amatuer photographer and my Grandfather donated his glass slides from his time there and they are available on the museum website.
https://photos.shetlandmuseumandarchives.org.uk/index.php?a=SearchResults&key=S3siTiI6Mjg1LCJQIjp7Iml0ZW1fdHlwZSI6MSwiam9pbl9vcCI6IjEiLCJjcml0ZXJpYSI6W1sicGhvdG9ncmFwaGVyIiw3LCJQaG90b2dyYXBoZXIiLCJCcm93biwgVyIsbnVsbCwyXV0sIml0ZW1fdHlwZV9sYWJlbCI6IkltYWdlIEl0ZW0ifX0&WINID=1613211864620&pg=1
The museum have a good history of valuing the photographs of islands, wherever they come from
Posted by: Gavin Mclelland | Saturday, 13 February 2021 at 05:31 AM
That NYTimes article reminded me of all the little local museums in the UK we used to visit on our trips there. I think I read there were ~2,000 of them.
Same goes for the US. It seems every small town has one and I'm rarely disappointed. The museum in Pahrump, NV turns out to have lots of history on the Nevada Test Site where the US did its nuclear testing. Carson City, NV has a museum in the old US Mint. Bisbee, AZ on the copper mining there that helped build America's electric grid and phone system. California gold rush country is full of these little museums. East Tennessee near Smoky MT. National Park has a museum for the Culver Cadet, the first private all-metal airplane. Rugby, TN, has a library with a priceless collection of English books because the founder from England was a friend of Dickens.
Mike, you need to wanter over to Watkins Glen (when things reopen) to the IMRRC, where you will find the largest archives of auto racing photography. That's where my collections now reside, along with many others. https://www.racingarchives.org/imrrc-blog/
Makes me anxious to get back to traveling, and little local museums have always been favorite places to stop and absorb local culture.
Posted by: Jim H | Saturday, 13 February 2021 at 04:33 PM
Hi; some of the John Hinde photos are online. It’s an interesting glimpse into the past in Ireland..http://www.johnhindecollection.com/john_hinde_print_sales.html
Posted by: Kenneth Kelleher | Sunday, 14 February 2021 at 04:53 AM