Will Troughton talks about Pickfords exhibition
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00:00 Hello, my name is Will Troughton, I'm Curator of Photography here at the National Library
00:07 of Wales. I'm going to tell you about our new exhibition, Aberystwyth on Camera, photographs
00:12 by Pickfords, 1880-1970. Pickfords were a company that operated in Pears Street in Aberystwyth.
00:19 They finally closed down in about 1972 and it's thought that most of the images that
00:24 they'd taken over the years had been destroyed. However, we were lucky enough that a few years
00:29 ago a gentleman brought in a cache of negatives that it seems had survived and this exhibition
00:35 includes about 60 or 70, which is a small proportion of the 1800 or so negatives that
00:40 are to be found in the collection. Most of them date from the 1930s to the 1950s and
00:47 they document all sorts of aspects of life in Aberystwyth. Many of the shops, the streets,
00:52 a lot of commercial vehicles, interiors of shops, many of which were taken for commercial
00:58 purposes by Pickfords. As we can see from the pictures that we've got here of Pickfords,
01:03 it was quite a big employer in the area because they weren't just commercial photographers,
01:08 they did a lot of developing and printing and when you were getting married or you had
01:11 a baby you would go to Pickfords to their studio to have your photographs taken. Some
01:16 of the earliest photographs here date from before Pickford from another photographer,
01:21 Mr Jide. These photographs date from the 1880s and they're on 12 by 10 inch glass negatives
01:27 so the detail on them is quite phenomenal. They include, for example, Trefechan Bridge
01:32 after it was washed away in 1886, Honeath Gallery Lead Mine, the North and South Wales
01:37 Bank which you now know as HSBC and various other views around the town including the
01:43 building of the School of Art which was then the Edward Davies Laboratories. All in all
01:48 there's probably around 70 pictures here. They date from the 1880s right up perhaps
01:53 to the early 1970s or so. They came in a wide variety of formats and if you want to
02:00 you can buy copies only the prints are on display here. Thank you.
02:04 Thank you.