Velox Girl

A girl. A smile. A camera. Click. Later: A black-and-white print (No name, no details). Much later: The black-and-white print On eBay. Sold. (No name, no details). The girl - Who knows?

With the aid of the simple editing tools in the Paintbrush application, I have attempted to tidy up the photograph which I bought on a whim a few months ago. I have also cropped it to a square format and applied an 'antique' finish. The earlier version is at www.ipernity.com/doc/341635/40626728 The original photograph was printed on Kodak Velox paper, a very slow printing paper producing a blue-black image suitable for contact printing. As the original print measures 3.25 x 4.25 inches it is reasonable to suppose the negative came from 118 type roll film such as a Box Brownie might need, or a Kodak Model 3 or a Hawk-Eye. All this helps to date the photograph, but the best indicator is on the reverse which has a repeat motif of ‘Kodak/Velox/Paper' in three lines. That dates it to sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, unless the developer was using old stock. Kodak discontinued that paper in 1968. Kodak advertised Velox as ‘the only photographic paper made exclusively for amateur negatives’. The use of Velox suggests that the print may have been the work of a keen photographer. The imperfections on this particular print indicate it was not made by a laboratory striving to maintain a business reputation. I know there is no reason not to own photographs which you have not taken yourself, and which are of people whom you do not know, yet my experience with the image makes me feel slightly voyeuristic. Ho-hum.

A photograph which I bought on eBay. It was not the best of compositions; something like a haystack in the background blended in with the girl's hair disconcertingly. With the aid of the simple editing tools in the Paintbrush application, I attempted to tidy it up. The original photograph was printed on Kodak Velox paper, a very slow printing paper producing a blue-black image suitable for contact printing. As the original print measures 3.25 x 4.25 inches it is reasonable to suppose the negative came from 118 type roll film such as a Box Brownie might need, or a Kodak Model 3 or a Hawk-Eye. All this helps to date the photograph, but the best indicator is on the reverse which has a repeat motif of ‘Kodak/Velox/Paper' in three lines. That dates it to sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, unless the developer was using old stock. Kodak discontinued that paper in 1968. Kodak advertised Velox as ‘the only photographic paper made exclusively for amateur negatives’. The imperfections on this particular print indicate it was not made by a laboratory striving to maintain a business reputation. Later I rendered it infrared via a filter effect, and now I have added a Daguerreotype effect in the Picmonkey editor. Collections of photographs which once meant something to somebody are a staple of house clearances. They are bought in auctions and sold online.

Photograph of unknown girl bought on eBay. Photograph photographed and processed. Processed photograph processed again. And again. Image then put on ipernity. Unrelated end-of-strip negatives superimposed on computer monitor showing photograph on ipernity, then photographed. New photograph processed and then put on ipernity again. I doubt I am finished with it yet. Nikon D700 + Tamron SP 35mm F1.8 Di VC lens.

I like the way the ipernity screen provides a taster of one's old pictures. Flickr used to do this before it turned to mush and kicked photography into the gutter. There were once some really innovative and creative photographers on Flickr, many of them young people with something arresting to exhibit and inspire. The way Flickr behaved towards the photographic community by first encouraging it and subsequently abandoning it was an outrage.