Ilford ….. the film of choice

Now, when this advert came out in the Eagle comic in 1959, I wouldn’t have given it much thought.

I was just ten, and  the only camera we had was one of those old fashioned bellows ones, which opened out and I am not sure it was ever used.

Although having said that, we have plenty of snaps of us all in the old house in Peckham, so I guess someone used it.

A full twenty years later I had embarked on photography, and after one false start, fastened on the Pentax X 1000, which was the Morris Minor of cameras.  

Mine travelled across Europe, endured the heat of Athens and Paris, and the indifferent weather of Britain, and plenty of places in between, suffering knocks and more than a few damaging encounters with walls as well as one memorable fall down a hill side.

Along the way I got into developing and printing my own pictures before finally going digital.

During my smelly chemical photographic years I used Ilford films and so the Eagle advert strikes a chord.

I was vaguely aware of the connection with the place of the same name, and assumed the company had a history which I shan’t begin to visit, leaving you to follow the link to an interesting story of Ilford’s past.*

Leaving me just to quote from my Wikipedia that “the company was founded in 1879 by Alfred Hugh Harman as the Britannia Works Company. Initially making photographic plates, it grew to occupy a large site in the centre of Ilford”.*

I now prefer using a digital camera, but know plenty of people who still use smelly film, and while digital images are easier to manipulate, I fear they may do history a disservice, because many pictures taken on a modern camera or phone will never be printed off, and at best stay as an electronic version, stored privately and lost when the device becomes obsolete or is lost and damaged.

And so will never make their way into museums as a record of how we once lived.

Pictures; Picture; Be Snap Happy ….. Buy Ilford, 1959, from the Eagle Comic, May 30, 1959, Vol. 10 No.22, and two Pentax cameras, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

* The History of Ilford Film, Analogue Wonderland, https://analoguewonderland.co.uk/blogs/film-photography-blog/the-history-of-ilford-film

**Ilford Photo, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilford_Photo