I’m six months, 2/3 of the way through a big digitising commission for Beaford Arts. The last time I did similar work for Beaford was the hidden histories project which finished in 2018. This time I am again digitising negatives mainly made by James Ravilious, but these are photographic copies he and others made of historic North Devon photographs dating from the 1850s to the 1940s. The negatives are housed in a protective strong room at the Devon Heritage Centre in Exeter. I’ve been making the digital duplicates of them in a ‘dedicated’ room on site which you’ll see glimpses of in the video.

In the 1970s when James Ravilious was working for Beaford Arts as a documentary photographer, specifically making an archive of rural life, he was invited to a WI meeting as guest speaker. Robin Ravilious tells the story in her biography ‘James Ravilious A LIFE’ as follows:

“In 1975, the Dolton branch of the Women’s Institute got wind of what James was doing and invited him to one of their monthly meetings as guest speaker. His duties were to give a short talk after the committee proceedings, with slides of his work, and then judge the competition of the month. This happened to be on the theme of Most Interesting Old Photo. Judging it, and talking to the members, James realised that there was an untapped source of early photographs in old family albums and shoeboxes all over the district: fascinating pictures of the same places that he was recording, but taken in the very early 1900s, sometimes earlier. In those days, before the arrival of the ubiquitous Box Brownie camera, such photos were often well-taken by trained photographers (the local chemist or shopkeeper adding a second source of income). But the prints that came to light were getting dog-eared and beginning to fade; and most were unlabelled. Their current owners could perhaps identify places and people in them, but memories would soon fade like the prints. James couldn’t bear to think of such rich and diverse documentation being thrown away. He persuaded the Beaford Centre that the old prints ought to be copied, and their known details recorded, as an important other strand of his work. It came to be known as the Old Archive. He bought the equipment to do it himself, and built a portable copy-stand to hold a camera and lights for the work, later donating them to the archive. In the end, he copied about five thousand photos, but after that he felt he had neither pay nor time for this as well as his own photography. George Tucker, followed by other colleagues – Beryl Yates, Bryony Harris and Liz Taynton – carried on the Old Archive work, adding another three thousand images, and dealing with exhibitions, publications and research.”

Equipment

For this project, I am using the full-frame, Nikon D850 which generates an image almost twice the size of the D610 at 45.4 megapixel with a sensor resolution of 8256 × 5504.

There was always going to be a cost of £100-£150 to adjust the Bowens Illumitran, which I used previously, so that it would accommodate the D850. However, I also looked at other options as we are 10 years further on in terms of technological progress from the developing stage of the Hidden Histories project. One of my gripes with the Bowens Illumitran was the LED lightbox which had been fitted as an update on its original flash lighting. I had discovered an unevenness in its brightness across the whole 35mm frame and had to make a mask in Photoshop to correct this in the post process. LED light boxes have improved considerably over the last 10 years so that there are some specifically designed to aid the digitation of negatives. One of these was purchased, the Sunray Box III Panorama Lightbox, and the hardware from the original Illumitran was adjusted to suit the new light source. I’m pleased to say that I am getting a far better even brightness, over the whole frame. Indeed, using this set up it would be possible to copy up to 5×4-inch negatives in the future.

Negative copying

There are approximately 8,200 35mm negatives in the Beaford Old Archive, but nobody really knows how many there are. My last guess is closer to 10,000, and my job is to digitise all of them!

The first negatives to be copied were those from the ‘five communities’ that Beaford will be working with to expand the historical breath of the Old Archive by including old photographs from the 1940s, 50s and 60s (the Lost Decades). The said communities, Dolton, Bideford, Hatherleigh, Atherington and Kings Nympton are found scattered throughout the 22 Books that the negatives are filed in. Every Old Archive image was going to be copied within the life of this project, so I made the decision earlier on that that I would not copy a single negative on its own, but a complete negative bag at a time. Therefore, I have gone through all the negative files, and wherever a negative from the five communities exists the whole film has been copied.

Sometimes there are many versions of the same image, however they all have the same file name, and I cannot know which the best version is until they have all been copied. There are other images with the same file numbers, that have one or many additional detailed or close up versions made, (a way of enlarging an important part of the original image) which I will give a suffix of -d1 etc. There’s a third category of images where the picture might appear many times but have been copied from a different photograph (from the same original historic negative) and have been given a different file number. And then there are a whole load of negatives that have no file number at all and don’t appear on the database but often look very interesting, as if they might have been misplaced from somewhere else in the archive (see image at the bottom of this post).

File naming and Preparing the Negative for inversion to Positive

There was usually more than one photograph (negative) made of each old photograph by James Ravilious and his successors with slight variations of exposure. At the negative copying stage, I generally made digital copies of every single negative except when there were clearly chemical stains, (fixer stains) on individual negatives and other, (clean and well exposed) negatives were available.

The high-quality full frame digital negs were created as RAW files in the Nikon format .NEF, these were then reformatted as the universally safer (Adobe) .dng file.

Each RAW negative was approximately 50GB and each tiff file 250gb, and so keeping all of them would be impossible on the storage devices associated with the project and unnecessary as the only difference between multiple negatives of the same old photograph is a slight variation of exposure. My first task here was to choose the best negative, in terms of exposure, to keep for the archive. This at first seemed relatively straightforward, as there was often a negative that had greater information in the highlights and shadows than the others.

Once a single negative (RAW file) had been selected to represent each old photograph the files were renamed to correspond to the naming in the Old Archive database. The first files that I renamed were understandably from Book 1 and this taught me a valuable lesson about the negatives, contact sheets and adjoining A4 index. The original photographs were not necessarily taken in the chronological order of the Archive names, the contact sheets were made of the strips of negatives at a specific time, and this didn’t necessarily correspond to how the negatives were in their negative bags when I went to copy them. Sometimes negatives were put back in the wrong order, sometimes negatives were returned upside down and sometimes they were back to front. I had noticed the occasional negative strip that was back to front at the copying stage and was able to right it. This jumble took a long time to rename. Since then, I double checked the correlation of negative to contact sheet and where I could I copied the negatives in the chronological order that they are given in the database rather than the order they were shot in.

Sometimes the old images had their file names alongside them within the photographic negatives, sometimes their file name was written on the contact sheet and sometimes it was only visible to read from the A4 index associated with them, and sometimes, there was a correction on the index sheet. Occasionally when there were conflicting names across the sources, I also checked the Archive database to look at the description.

The reason for correctly naming the images at this stage as RAW negatives becomes apparent as the inversion to positive and onward take place. The image (file) needs to keep the same name throughout, as it is the same image, the file type with its suffix: .dng, .tiff, and .jpg differentiates the files as negative, archival positive and website/social media positive.

Short film (silent version) shown at the Burton Art Gallery in Bideford for the Westward Ho! and Bideford Art Society exhibition 2024.
If your signal is low set the quality to 720p!

Teaching Approach

Teaching photography to primary school children with Beaford, often felt quite pioneering! It wasn’t as if there was a syllabus I could work from, it’s not on the national curriculum and it may never have been taught before to children as young as seven. I worked alongside Matt Biggs, who taught them filmmaking. We often team taught and then split classes so that we could concentrate on smaller groups for our individual specialist subjects. We would always evaluate our teaching at the end of a school day, trying to refine, adapt and make it better for the next day with that class or for the next time we would teach that particular session.

Using photographic and film studios became more and more important in our work. Young children can be quite restless and we had been encouraged to allow them to run about outside to let off steam; and in the early days of the project tried to base a lot of the practical work out of doors. This had worked well for the older children, but the younger ones found it difficult to associate being outside in a playground with school work. Once they were outside they would just want to play. So we radically changed things and became far more studio focused. But it was still important to take the children out of the classroom or out of the classroom environment that they knew. This was achieved by completely transforming their classrooms into photographic and film studios.

The Photographic Studio

To introduce children to the photographic studio I would show them the high-key fashion photographs by Richard Avedon and low-key portraits by Yousef Karsh. The children would freeze movement in the bright, white, Avedon inspired studio and create emotional portraits with deep shadows using the background and harsh lighting of Karsh.

The conversion of the classroom to a studio was often done by the children who loved to help with these practical exercises and were essentially left to get on with the task, working as a team and problem solving how best to move the tables and chairs, where to put them, and how to stack them to make two separate spaces within the classroom.

To keep the children occupied each of them was given a role in the studio, roles which were continually interchanged with other class members so that they all experienced everything. This started with some of them being tasked with erecting the lights and opened up the reflectors. One of the children was responsible for the lighting, using a kill-spill to prevent light straying onto the camera and giving flare, another child used the reflector another a diffuser. There were another couple of children needed to hold the black screen in place to stop light falling on the black background, another child took the photographs and had another, confident child, acting as the photographer’s assistant with them. Finally, one of the children would be photographed in costume and sometimes two or three were photographed together to make a scene in their story.

Every photograph in the above videos was taken by a Primary School child, in their school classroom with assistance from their class mates. Once the children had successfully completed introductory excersises my role was as an overseer, advisor and encourager.