français

Copyright © 1998
Nova Scotia Museum

Take a closer look at photographs

Old photographs taken in Nova Scotian communities in times past are among the most useful and fascinating resources we have for the study of community history. There are certainly lots of them. If you are diligent and poke around long enough in attics, flea markets, archives and museums you are sure to turn up photographs of all sorts of aspects of the daily lives of the people who lived in your city, town or village in years gone by. You will find posed portraits and family snapshots, photographs of churches, schools, factories, landscapes and streetscapes, group photos of work crews, dignitaries, Sunday-school picnics, bicycle clubs, secret societies and circus entertainers. If you learn to look carefully at these photographs and ask them penetrating questions, you will find out things about the past of your community that you will not discover in any other way.

This Info is about looking at old photographs and learning how to ask good questions of them. Getting the most out of photographs requires careful observation, a lively curiosity, thoughtful analysis, leaps of the imagination and a willingness to have fun.

Our focus is on streetscapes. In some ways this is an arbitrary choice, but streetscapes do have some advantages for people learning to look at photographs. Good nineteenth-century streetscapes of Nova Scotian communities are relatively common, most of them filled with fascinating, thought-provoking details. And old streetscapes have an interesting relationship to the present-day communities in which we live: you can often still go today and stand where the photographer stood and see for yourself how things have changed or remained the same.

There are lots of questions you can ask yourself about streetscapes. Many do not have a single correct answer. They are designed to direct your attention to aspects of the photograph, to arouse your curiosity and to stimulate your imagination. If one question does not make sense to you, or does not seem to lead anywhere, check your reaction with someone else, or simply skip it.