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Copyright © 1998
Nova Scotia Museum

Take a closer look at photographs

1. For starters, do you know from an external source where or when this photograph was taken?

2. What can you tell from the photo itself about when it was taken? What year? What season of the year? What time of day?

3. What can you tell about the community in which this street is set? How large is it? How densely populated? Would you like to live there?

4. Can you tell anything about the economy of this community? Is there any hint in the photo about a local industry, for example? Do the people seem rich or poor?

5. Why was the photograph taken? For a newspaper? As a snapshot? Imagine that you are the photographer: what are you trying to show? (It might help to ak yourself, if you've ever taken a picture of a street in your community, why you did. If you haven't, why not?)

6. Are the people in the photograph posed? Why? Why not?

7. What was the state of photographic technology when this picture was taken? What did people have to go through to take a photograph? (Earlier cameras blurred people who were moving. Later cameras had faster shutter speeds and so were able to stop action. But even early cameras took only a matter of seconds to take a photograph. Just think of what happens in the space of a few seconds. For example, people move but buildings do not. But if photographers are mainly interested in buildings, they may not mind if some of the people are fuzzy.)

8. If the buildings in the photograph are still standing today, what sort of differences would be revealed by a photo taken today? For example, would there be differences in the physical objects around the buildings, in the way they are painted, etc.?]

9. What can you tell about the key elements of urban landscape from examining this photo? What kinds of road surfaces are there? What kind of sidewalks, lighting, drainage, structures and spaces are there? What sort of mixture of function is there (in other words, are all the buildings used for the same purpose or are they used for different purposes)?

10. What can you tell about the community from the way the buildings are used? For example, if there is a store that sells just organs, what does this tell you about the siae of the community?

11. How do people advertize what they sell? Through signs? Through window displays? What might it be like to shop in one of these stores?

12. Is there a difference between the signs in this photo and the signs in a photo of another community at the same time period, or the signs we might discover in your own community today?

13. What can you tell from the exterior of the buildings in this photograph about how the building was used? What are the exteriors designed to tell you?

14. Are the buildings in the photograph being used for their original purpose or have they been adapted to some new use?

15. Are there trees in this street scene? Why? Why not?

16. If the buildings are still standing today, what are they being used for now? What kind of buildings tend to survive?

17. Were the buildings along this street all built at the same time? Why? Why not?

18. What materials were used to build these buildings? Why were they chosen?

19. What can we learn from this photo about transportation? How did people get around? What are the vehicles in the photograph being used for?

20. If you were drawing or painting this scene would the result be the same? Would a drawing have more or less detail, for example? Might your drawing or painting have colour? (It is worth remembering that, although old photographs were always black and white, nineteenth-century people did not live in a black-and-white world.)

21. Another difference between photographs and drawings is that photographs record accidents both in events and details while drawings include only what the artist decides should be there. What was purposeful about this photograph? What was accidental?

22. What would it have felt like to have been someone captured in this photograph at that time? Would you have been hot or cold? Does the dust from the street tickle your nose? Where are you going? How do you plan to spend your day? Where would you most like to be in this photograph? Where would you least like to be? Why?

23. How might you see this scene differently if you were standing inside it, rather than looking in on it from the outside?

24. Imagine what happened in the three minutes before and after this photograph was taken.

25. Write a playlet, poem or story based on the photograph.