Old pictures are compelling peek at past

The landscape and environment of days gone by – how street scenes and buildings and landscapes have changed over the years – are interesting, but even more so, I think, are the people.

This week’s Scrapbook picture on the Journal’s Heritage page (p96) shows a group of picnickers at Stonehenge.

They’re just average people on a day out.

But they all lived and died before any of us were born.

It’s quite bittersweet to look into the earnest eyes of a young boy staring into the camera and to realise that he was a living, breathing person with the same sort of hopes and dreams as any child of today.

It makes you feel like a small cog in the wheel of humanity, and it’s almost eerie, but it also gives a certain sense of continuity.

It’s a bit like looking through the old copies of the Journal we keep in the office to do the From Our Files section on the same page as Scrapbook, to find that on this day 50 years ago the issues people were getting all hot under the collar about were the cost of parking and traffic congestion.

Some things don’t change.

But some things do, and we owe a lot to the early film enthusiasts who were there with their cameras to record both everyday scenes and momentous occasions.

Today we tend to take it for granted that we can snap a picture on a mobile phone, upload it to the web and have it seen by anyone around the globe in seconds.

Likewise, when we go to the cinema we expect the special effects to be exactly that.

The skills that go into modern technology are astounding and I am in awe of what can be done today, but the images of long ago are somehow even more special because those taking them didn’t have that technology to work with.

Those Were the Days!, being shown at Salisbury Arts Centre tomorrow, uses film from the last century to put together a picture of the people and communities of Salisbury and south Wiltshire.

It should be a fascinating peek at the past.

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