A Few Family Photos from the 1960s & 1970s

Where do you get your love of photography from? I think I get it from my parents. My dad took hundreds of photos of my mum. She was clearly his favourite subject. They met when she was 15, he was 17. I’d love to say they stayed together forever more, but they didn’t; by the time I was two years old they’d split up, so in total their relationship probably lasted 7 years or so.

When he moved to Germany, my dad gave me a scrapbook full of photos he’d taken of mum; I put them in an album. One day I’ll scan the entire thing.

Me with my mum — Me and Mum, taken by my Dad.

brenda3 1 — Mum, taken by my Dad in the Isle of Wight. I think this is one of his personal favourites.

My dad is particularly proud of the photos of my mum that he took while they were on holiday on the Isle of Wight. I grew up seeing boxes and boxes of photos at his house. But mum sometimes took photos too.

Mum, probably age 15 outside the family house in Ruislip. I’ve found endless inspiration in this image of mum, and it has inspired a whole series of images taken on a Kodak Brownie Cresta 3 using 120 black and white film.

I don’t know if mum had a Polaroid camera. But I really wanted one. The idea that the photograph would appear immediately was just magical for me. I had to give my films to an adult in the vain hope that they would take them to a local chemist or photography shop to be developed. Occasionally they did, but most of the time they didn’t. I’d usually have film though; when you got a film developed they’d give you a free one, but most of the wider family only used them for photographs of holidays, birthdays and Christmas.

brenda and les photobooth 9 — Mum and Dad, station photobooth, London, 1960s

sarah child 3 — Me as a child with a talking Yogi Bear. You’d pull the bead on it’s belly button and it would say something like, “Smarter than the average bear.”

sarah child — Me, family holiday in Italy

One thought on “A Few Family Photos from the 1960s & 1970s”

Lovely. I’ve a huge number of my family’s photos – I scanned most of them years ago but one day want to redo them at a higher resolution because the originals are so small. Your mum was very pretty then – and looks very 1960s. 🙂 I guess she’s from my generation. I had a friend (now gone) who looked a bit like your mum in does your top and last two photos in this post. She was 15 when she had her first child, too. You look very sweet here, too.

LikeLiked by 1 person