Vintage Inspiration – Photo Archives by Betsy Hatter

Retro Chick is taking a well earned break, but to keep you entertained today’s post comes from Betsy Hatter,

I want to use my guest post on Retro Chick to introduce you all to brilliant, under used online historical picture archives which everyone can access. These amazing resources are local newspapers picture archives. Many of the pictures in these collections are wonderful day to day snapshots of life from the 1940’s onwards (sometimes further back but those pictures are rarer). You come across pictures of people at work and children playing as well as people all dressed up in their best for royal visits and official openings. You can see what people were really wearing and use the images to help put together your own style.

I became familiar with with the newspaper archives through my ‘day job’. I work on the picture desk at the Eastern Daily Press and spend a lot of time finding pictures to illustrate stories written by our journalists. Often I’m just searching the recent picture library for images of MPs or generic pictures for various campaigns, however when someone has written a historical piece I get to search the older archives. This is my favourite part of the job and I’m always getting totally side tracked looking at the people in the pictures. Unfortunately it’s very rare for me to be asked specifically for fashion pictures. But even pictures of streets are a great resource as people were out and about when the photographer took the picture. I have been using the archives to research hat styles from the 1950s. I have a sketch book next to me and I doodle down any styles I come across for future reference.

You can find the Eastern Daily Press’s archives at www.edp24.co.uk and then click through to the myphotos24 tab (EDITORS NOTE: This is a direct link to the archive). You can enter a search from there (I find picking a year to search works quite well) or you can go through to the ‘historical archive’ which is then divided into different subjects. I must stress that all the images will be copyrighted so you can not use them without permission from the newspaper. You can buy copies from these websites for personal use, but you will need extra permission from the copyright holder if you want to reproduce the images.

The Eastern Daily Press isn’t the only newspaper to have these online archives. I have looked at a few other newspaper’s websites to see if they have an online gallery and in most cases, they do. However some are better than others. Some have dedicated historical archives, which can be found in the photo sales section of the website. I found some brilliant pictures of Diana Dors filming in Luton in 1953 on the Luton Today website and the Liverpool Echo has some really interesting galleries in it’s ‘Nostalgia‘ section

Anyway, that’s it from me. I really hope you enjoy looking through these archives as much as I do!