One exhibition that might not come across your radar is Snaps Walking Pictures at Bridlington until 3 August 2011. Easy On The Eye have a display of walking picture images running from April 16 – August 3 2011 at Sewerby Hall, near Bridlington, East Yorkshire. I have also done an online gallery of the images for people who might be interested (“Snaps” Walking Pictures ).
The idea for this display arose after contacting East Riding of Yorkshire Council, and curators at Sewerby Hall and Gardens, who were helpful in furnishing me with information and images they held regarding the Snaps company and William Foster-Brigham, who operated in Bridlington.
It is difficult to display original waking pictures. They were produced at speed and can become brittle with age and sensitive to light. For the exhibition I decided to produce a series of prints based on the original images but incorporating graphic and handwritten elements often found on the back of the photographs, placed there by the producers and subsequent owners. The original images were scanned at very high resolution then edited digitally, although nothing has been removed from the photographs themselves beyond some cropping. These new images were then uploaded to a local photographic processors via the internet and outputted onto Fujiflex, one of the new photographic papers developed in recent years for digital photographs. One cannot help but wonder what William Foster Brigham would have made of all these innovations in his trade.
The original photographs are largely from the Easy On The Eye collection of Walking Pictures. In most cases the people are unknown but where we have any detail it is given in the caption list accompanying the gallery. I would like to thank Colin Harding at Bradford Media Museum for the loan of a couple of images. Also David Barnard who ran the remainder bookshop Wharf 18, Prince Street. David allowed me access to the premises to look for traces of the Snaps business before he closed his shop at the start of 2011.
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