My art practice has long been concerned with exploring places where personal archives merge with wider cultural history. The experiences which are apparently unique yet universally shared.
I have over the years collected a great many 8mm and super 8mm cine films which are fascinating snapshots of a individual yet recognisable history. There are weddings and holiday films galore following familiar tropes across the years. These have been a great visual resource for me as an artist, but I do wonder how is it that these once treasured family moments end up lost, bought at car boot sales or on ebay and separated from their history. I thought it would be interesting to get these old films back out into the world and where better than YouTube.
So I have done a little editing, colour correction and maybe tried to remove some of the wobbles but essentially these are films as were lovingly taken at the time in an effort to record for posterity those moments we all know. I have also used facebook to post videos in the location in which they were originally shot to hopefully reunited these “orphaned films” with some of the people who appear in them. This has had some moments of real serendipity, I was contacted by someone from Yorkshire who having seen of of the films on a local “then and now” facebook page recognised the film as one his grandad had taken more than 40 years earlier and also a local newspaper in Ipswich were interested in a film of new houses being built back in the 1960’s and ran the story hoping to find someone who knew who was being filmed. So I am adding the link to some of the films here and hopefully somebody else might just stumble across a long lost family treasure. Take a look at the YouTube channel to see all the films so far .