Getting your picture taken

There is something about that formal posed photograph which my parent’s generation and those behind them went in for.

We all have them whether in old fashioned picture frames, or shabby and much used albums and in some cases just loose in a drawer with letters by relatives we know nothing about.

They stare back at you mostly looking very serious, no doubt calculating how much the session was costing or with that faint smile which they know they shouldn’t because this is a special occasion.

And I have become fascinated by what they tell us of the period they were taken.  The most obvious thing of course is their clothes and hairstyles but this is only the start.  In many you don’t see people smiling because to do so would reveal the lack of teeth which was the product of poor diet and an income which precluded the dentist.

Then there is the correct way they stand or sit, often in an arranged way, with the woman sitting down the man standing behind or to one side, and the children in front at the feet of their parents.  It is a style of posing that goes back into the paintings of an early age.

Then there is the cigarette.  It is always there in the movies of the 1930s and 40s and transferred to the formal photograph.  So on a series of pictures taken I guess in the late 1940s there is my mother with a cigarette in hand.

But at least neither she nor my grandparents went in for the studio props which in an earlier age would have been a required addition.  The elaborate table, with its arrangement of flowers the stuffed animals or the mock country scene are missing from my family pictures.

None of which I can say I miss.  But then none of ours come with those beautiful engraved back covers offering the names of the studio in gilt lettering.  Sadly the best we can do is a postcard of grandmother in Derby in the June of 1930 which was placed on a postcard by Spotlight Photos Ltd Derby.

But these engraved back covers are themselves a wonderful source of information.  It enabled me to track the success of a local family of photographers by the list of premises they advertised.  Not I grant you earth shattering stuff but nevertheless another little part of the bigger story.

Charles Ireland took one of the best pictures of a Chorlton cinema.* He had died in 1930 aged 63, left £5,330 to his widow and was buried in Southern Cemetery.   He had been born in Newton in Manchester in 1867 and by 1891 the family were living here on St Clements Road.

This seems to have been a step up.  The family home on Oldham Road in Newton was at the heart of an industrial area.  Just to the north was the large carriage and wagon works of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and to the south and east there were brick works cotton mills, bleach works as well a glass works.

Charles’s father Edward was in partnership as a pawnbroker although he also described himself as a photographer, and by 1891 this appears to have been his sole occupation.  There were as yet few photographers listed in the directories for Manchester in the 1880s and they are still described as artists.  By 1895 he had opened the shop on Lower Mosley Street which Charles still ran until the late 1920s.

Sometime during the early 20th century he opened studios in Edinburgh and Hanley. All of which allowed him to purchase the large house on the corner of Kingshill Road and Edge Lane and for his son to buy the large property on High Lane which had once been the art school of Tom Mostyn.

It is a remarkable story for a man who began as the partner of a pawnbroker and says a lot about the money that could be made from formal photography, which is pretty much where we came in.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/forgotten-photograph-palais-de-luxe-in.html