The Isle of Wight Revisited: A Collection of Photographs Produced from the Original Glass Plate Negatives

Most of the photographs in this book were taken nearly a hundred years ago. Some are older and date from the 1890s and a few are from the 1920s. All the photographs were taken on glass negatives and apart from a handful, have not been seen since the day they were first printed. Over the passing years, the glass negatives have lain untouched in their boxes until now. Without exception, all the photographs in this book have been produced by returning to these original glass plate negatives to produce stunning new prints from them, modern technology allowing them to be carefully and sensitively restored with a degree of sophistication unimagined by the photographers. The result is a unique collection of photographs of the Island, all of the highest quality. The negatives are part of a collection of nearly 700 glass plates belonging to the authors, that has been gathered together over the last 30 years. Many of the photographs were originally taken for commercial purposes, to be cropped and then produced in small runs as postcards for the tourist trade, whilst others were simply taken as family mementoes and holiday snapshots. Almost certainly, none of the photographers could have foreseen that their work would still be in existence 100 years later, let alone that it would have acquired enough historical interest to have inspired a book. This time we have been able to extract the maximum detail from the original plates and present them in a larger format and in a higher quality than the original photographers could have dreamt of. We have no doubt they would be pleased and proud to see their work brought to life again. Truly, the Isle of Wight revisited. Each plate has a brief description beneath it, with an extended caption to found in the rear of the book. The negatives used for this volume are the work of seven, possibly more, generally unknown photographers; the exception to this being those of William R. Hogg, a name well known to today's vintage postcard collectors, who was a photographic postcard producer from Ryde, who also owned and ran George Street Post Office. There is naturally therefore, a greater percentage of Hogg's work in this book than that of any other contributor. It is fair to assume that most of the photographs of the East Wight area are the work of Hogg. At the turn of the last century, when most of these images were produced, it would have been common practice to produce 'contact prints' which were made by placing the previously developed negative on top of a sheet of light sensitive photographic paper in a darkened room and then exposing the layered 'sandwich', briefly, to high intensity light, usually a tungsten bulb. On developing the paper, an identically sized, positive print would be produced, consequently, most photographers of this period hardly ever saw their work enlarged and sadly, were unable to appreciate the full beauty and quality of their images. Ironically, the most technically capable of the photographers whose work is displayed here, W.R. Hogg, although using the larger half plate format, which produced the highest quality negatives was actually losing 33 per cent of each image by cropping the picture to fit the standard postcard-size format of 3-1/2 in. X 5-1/2 in. Consequently, this means that for the first time, these Hogg images are now being seen in their entirety and in optimum quality.