From the moment he discovered a box of intriguing colour photographs tucked away in his grandfather’s cupboard, David Tomkins felt compelled to learn more about his relative’s life and travels. Where exactly had he been? And what were his adventures like?
They were questions to which he thought he might never know the answers – his grandfather, Stephen Clarke, having been unable to recall them before his death in 2013.
But thanks to the help of hundreds of people around the world via his website, Grandpa’s Photos, Tomkins has successfully retraced most of his grandfather’s footsteps and his three-year photographic treasure hunt is almost complete. The Australian started with 50 images of unidentified origins; now there’s only one location still to be found.
“Our Grandpa had to go into a nursing home in 2009 and we all had to chip in and help clean out his house in Morisset (New South Wales),” Tomkins says of the day he discovered the 35mm slides.
“I had no idea that Grandpa had travelled or that he was into photography, so I was there holding these slides up to the light for the next five or six hours trying to work out where he’d been. I thought they were beautiful, really well composed, and I wanted to know all about them.
“He was always such a vibrant, vivacious guy, I thought talking to him about them would be a great thing to do. So I did a big reveal at the nursing home and I was really excited, but in a strange way he really wasn’t very interested. He looked at them and went ‘ah yeah, that’s good Dave, I don’t really remember’.”
It was only after his grandfather died that Tomkins quit his job and began the hunt. He enlisted the help of the public after realising that local knowledge would be critical in deciphering the little clues hidden within each photo.
“One of the photos is of Sydney harbour bridge, and the opera house is half-built,” he explains. “I showed it to a couple of friends from overseas and they were like ‘where is that?’. It’s pretty obvious to anyone in Australia so I thought, well, maybe when I have no idea where a photo was taken it’ll be really obvious to someone from overseas where that fountain is or where that river is.”
‘I love Grandpa’s original shot of this photo so much, I felt I just had to try and re-enact it a tiny bit. The Peak lookout was totally rebuilt after Grandpa took the original photo so I had to just accept that the new one would be different and enjoy the view.’ Photographs: Stephen Clarke and David Tomkins
Of the locations Tomkins sought to find, 45 were swiftly discovered. He then set off to retrace his grandfather’s steps in person. From Florence to Hong Kong, Sydney to New York, he zigzagged the world recreating each of the shots with a Voigtländer camera, just as his grandfather had used in the mid-1960s.
There was one in particular which delighted him: recreating the shot of his grandfather in a Venetian restaurant. “It’s the only travel photo that he’s in and I didn’t ever think that I’d find that one because the only real clue is a foggy steeple out the window,” he says.
“When I went there I had this whole dream that I would round up a few tourists, maybe buy them lunch so that they could sit in the chairs and re-enact the photo, but I walked in at lunchtime and it was dead. I thought ‘oh no this is not going to be the dream’. But I went back in for dinner and the whole place was completely different, hundreds of people, and the owner of the restaurant was there.”
He adds: “If you look at the old photo there’s a guy in the background who’s a waiter. I showed the current waiters the photo and they started crying. They said ‘that’s Georgio, the owner’s dad’.”
‘The restaurant is called Trattoria da Romano. The owner told me about the old books the restaurant had kept that patrons sign, going back many years. I hoped to find Grandpa’s signature in one of the books but no luck. It didn’t matter, this was the closest I’d felt to Grandpa in years. Incredible.’ Photographs: Stephen Clarke and David Tomkins
The emotional impact of the project has been half the pleasure, Tomkins says, and he recalls a poignant message from a woman in Serbia who wrote to him to say, “I loved your website; I called my dad and we haven’t talked in 20 years”.
“What’s been really great is most of the time when I talk to people about this project we very quickly get to their story and their grandpa or grandma’s story. I think it goes right around and it helps us understand ourselves better. I think that’s what resonates with people.”
Indeed, he believes his grandfather was himself drawn to photography as a means to connect with his father. “Grandpa’s dad was a photographer in the bush so I imagine he didn’t really get to spend much time with him and wanted his attention. Maybe picking up the camera and taking it on these trips was a way to understand him, and ironically that’s exactly what I’m trying to do too.”
‘I imagined this one was somewhere out in the hills, isolated, on someone’s rooftop. Maybe overlooking what is now probably a defunct amusement park. When I was in Australia, the idea of finding it felt semi-impossible. I had no idea. But numerous people pointed out that it was Tibidabo amusement park in Barcelona.’ Photographs: Stephen Clarke and David Tomkins
At the start of this week, Tomkins had two locations still on his “missing” list. However, one has just been pinpointed as a tiny town in southern Spain, leaving only the final image: slide #4.
It was always going to be the toughest. It depicts little more than a canal bending away from the camera and appears to have been shot from a moving train or car. Tomkins thinks it may have been taken somewhere in Switzerland, though he’s a little perturbed at the prospect of finding out for sure.
“By doing this project it’s in a weird way like it’s almost keeping Grandpa alive. And I think what’s funny about the last photo is that I don’t know if I want to find it. Maybe that’s a more interesting conclusion? As soon as we find the last one it’s kind of all over and Grandpa’s finally dead, which is a little bit sad.”
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