Golden Age topographical postcards offer valuable insights into local history, but few identify the photographer, which consigns most pictures to the difficult area of orphaned works. Recent developments in 'risk aware' publication have freed some images from a further forty to sixty years of legal limbo, but not everyone has resources robust enough to pursue that path. One small community organisation is exploring a relatively risk averse way of enlisting public help in identifying photographers of the 500+ postcards that show its local scenes from the 1900s to 1920s.
Brislington Community Museum (Bristol, UK), has launched an exhibition of hundreds of such problematical postcards in the hope their photographers may be identified. A range of measures have been taken to keep the images legal (including putting a time limit on the exhibition). A dozen photographers are known already - from all over the British Isles - and those whose works are out of copyright have been published freely online (and archived at the British Library). Help is needed to find the other photographers whose works form the remaining 85% of this local resource.
Full details of this project can be found online (https://www.brislington.org/gallery/postcards/publishers2.html) until the end of August.
Comments
Thanks Bobbie for your constructive comment regarding AI's ability to pull good images from faded photographs. I've had some success performing such optimisation manually, but I dare say AI would be faster. Of course if the original was blemished or otherwise damaged, AI might dream up something to fill the gap (as you say, it misinterpreted the title), so I would always want to see a label showing it's an AI-enhanced image. It's a great example though: the transition from the faded postcard to the full colour version is very impressive.
Talking of old postcard scenes where among[st] one's collection the odd photo postcard picture is horribly degraded, foxed, faded and obscure of its pictoriality as to be barely discernable of the poor postcard's picture just as Brislington Community Museum (Bristol, UK) must find a few of its old postcards similarly unseeably fuzzed. But, fear not for varied of us fogie collectors taken to intrepidly utilising free-to-use online photo enhancing AI robot (bot) tools can revivify, revive and make vital once more, even with glorious Technicolor the ‘colorising’of our picture postcards thanks to dear friend ‘Botty’. I upload a faded example of an early 1900s Kent country house 'The Paddocks, Smeeth' (now occupied by The Caldecott Foundation childrens’ charity, therapeutic community and school) being the former residence of one Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen, 1st Baron Brabourne (1829 – 1893) to evidence the faded history of the original old postcard resurrected to a sharpened view and then to the glory of a colo[u]rised version wonderfully chromatically corporeal notwithstanding that the postcard tinkering bot is only able to read what it ‘sees’ in text and supplies misspelling to my postcard’s title ~ which with further instructions at a time hence might see the amenable bot correct dutifully said misspellings.
I didn't upload the 'Brislington Post Office and Tram Terminus' postcard above my text - it's one of the 85% where the photographer isn't known. Another version of the photograph is in the museum's exhibition (https://www.brislington.org/gallery/postcards/1_west2.html) - fourth picture down. I imagine only the blog's moderators can add an illustration to someone's post like this, and this example clearly champions the 'risk aware' strategy.
By a happy coincidence, the moderator's photograph was taken from the same spot as a postcard titled 'Brislington' by Jesse C Young (c.1883 - 1917, a Bristol-based photographer), which is now copyright-free, that I've attached below. These two views illustrate perfectly the value of publishing for the local historian - to have the widest range of images available - to chronicle the differences between them.