Photographic memory

For years they were stored in rows of filing cabinets in the bowels of the Museum Street building, seen only by the librarians and researchers fortunate enough to book an appointment.

Then along came the National Lottery, and York history enthusiasts hit the jackpot. A grant of £129,000 from the New Opportunities Fund funded Imagine York, a library project to make these photographs available to all who have access to a computer.

Project officer Yvette Turnbull has been leading a team of 11 volunteers researching thousands of photographs and scanning them on to the website www.imagineyork.co.uk since April 2002. Among the images are some made available to the public for the first time.

Not everyone has joined the digital revolution. For them, and for those who like to switch off their computer to relax, a new selection of these York photographs has been brought out as a book.

York: Pictures From The Past is the third collection of library pictures published in the Images Of England series. Compiled by Yvette, it boasts more than 200 photographs covering 150 years of history.

Thanks to Yvette's impressive research, and that of her volunteers, the pictures are often accompanied by lengthy captions which not only give dates and facts, but the extra information - people, shop names, anecdotes - that bring them back to life.

Yvette draws on the long connection between York and photographers in her introduction to the book.

In 1844 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson took portraits of scientists at the British Association of the Advancement of Science's annual meeting being held in York, she writes. A year later William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the calotype process, the forerunner of photography as we know it today, made a series of representations of city views and buildings.

"At this time photography was struggling to be accepted and many photographers felt that the best way of achieving this was by presenting the result as an art form," she writes.

"This initially meant they were loath to adopt a reportage style, preferring empty streets and unobscured buildings, with people represented only to provide an area of scale or as pure portraiture.

"Regrettably this makes the early pictures produced by York's first professional photographer, William Pumphrey, in the 1850s, perhaps less interesting than they otherwise might have been."

This approach changed when Roger Fenton arrived in York. He is generally known as the first war photographer and he came to the city to "practise" for the Crimea.

"He had been told that Yorkshire would be an ideal place to try out his covered wagon - a combination of darkroom and studio for creating his wet collodion plates - before taking it to the conflict.

"The reality of his approach was not entirely to be relied upon, however, as he, too, carefully staged pictures, going so far as to arrange cannonballs on the battlefield into a pleasing composition."

So from the start the camera was made to lie.

After working on the photographs for the website, Yvette has deliberately selected some lesser known images for the book; and, she confessed, also sneaked in some of her favourites.

"Before work was begun on cataloguing images for the site, many of the photographs in the collection were inaccessible; a beautiful collection of glass plates had remained in a locked cupboard for many years, many in their original boxes, uncatalogued, unknown and unused.

"Some have proved to be of immense interest to local historians, for example, pictures of stained glass destroyed by bombing during the Second World War and photographs of certain events or places which have since been demolished and which were thought to be unrecorded."

So what now for the Imagine York project? It is in the balance. Without new funding, it finishes at the end of September. If another grant comes through, the project can expand.

So far 4,000 photographs are on the website. There are thousands more waiting to go on, and more are being added to the collection every week.

"What's happened is we now find large numbers of people bring in their own photographs, some of which are absolutely super," Yvette said.

The York racecourse committee has also loaned Imagine York some excellent pictures of Edwardian racegoers enjoying a day out at Knavesmire.

Meanwhile, people are emailing more information on the photographs already filed on the website said Yvette.

"A lovely one came in last week from a woman in New Zealand who looked at photographs from the early 1900s.

"One of them showed a suit of armour in a shop window. Her family owned that antique shop and her father was terrified of that suit of armour."

The council has applied for more funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Yvette will know whether the bid has been successful in August.

If so, the team can start scanning in artefacts as well as more photographs. These could include letters, household accounts, ration books, scrapbooks, gala souvenir programmes and much more. Web surfers around the world could call up a piece of York's social history and read it on screen.

Among the documents waiting to be scanned in are thank-you letters sent by First World War troops to Rowntree's, which had supplied them with tins of chocolate for Christmas.

Evocative stuff. We can only hope that the lottery money comes through to keep this wonderful combination of history and technology running.

York: Pictures From The Past, by Yvette Turnbull is published by Tempus, price £12.99, and should be in shops now

There are occasions in this job when you wish the ground could open up and swallow you. That was certainly the case when I learned I had blundered in last week's Yesterday Once More and added a year to Stella Cloughton's age.

We published a correction the following day but I felt it only right to add a personal apology for the mistake which caused Mrs Cloughton, now 99, understandable embarrassment.

Updated: 08:41 Monday, July 19, 2004