Part 2. Lost to the series
The purpose of this weekly series, as described in its first part, is to rediscover photography commissioned and published by the Observer that would otherwise languish in our picture library. We publish a weekly offering online as close to the original publication day and month as we can. The article consists of the published photograph (sometimes with additional images from the shoot), combined with the original text, the intention being to create a searchable record of the work of some brilliant 20th century newspaper photographers.
When I started the task of going through the old issues of the Observer, I already had some favourites in mind and was looking forward to finding them and sharing them with the readers. But it wasn’t always that simple. I can find no trace of the publication of some I hoped to include.
Michael Peto’s Foggy day in Dundee (which you can buy as a giclée print from our partner here) is a case in point. I haven’t been able to find it in any 1959 edition. Maybe it wasn’t taken on assignment. Maybe it was but didn’t make the cut. Maybe the story didn’t stand up and was spiked or maybe it was moved downpage and didn’t carry a photograph.
It happens still. In November 2018, Observer photographer Gary Calton was commissioned to go to Wigan in the north west of England to document a constituency that had voted to leave the European Union for an article about whether residents had changed their minds. He returned with this wonderful photograph which he described as “channeling his inner Lowry”. Due to a subsequent cabinet resignation, the article and photographs were never published.
Another possibility for a photograph going unpublished is that the print in the picture library was never intended for the paper. Often a photographer going to, or returning from, a job will see something, stop and capture the moment. In 1960, Jane Bown was passing through Earl’s Court Underground station, probably returning from covering Crufts dog show or the Royal Tournament (annual events that always made good standalone photographs for the paper), when she saw a London Transport worker. Bown only exposed one negative. The photograph has appeared in books, but was never destined for the paper.
The final frustration for the completist is that the records are incomplete. There are gaps in the bound volumes of the paper and the online service that reproduces facsimiles of them. The whole of April 1955, December 1972 and January 1973 as well as numerous individual issues, are missing. Some of the photographs I had hoped to run in this series may well be in those lost editions. We’ll never know.
Ultimately, the photographs that didn’t make the paper, for whichever reason, don’t belong in this series.
Buy an archival-quality giclée print of ‘Foggy day in Dundee’ from our partner theprintspace
The third and final part of lost and found will be published on 26 January 2019.
