About the Assorted Portraits Category

These photographs are mainly original studio portraits. The time when families and individuals visited a photo studio have now disappeared. Today we take it for granted how easy it is to copy an image – there are now so many ways to do it with digital media and reproduction equipment. At the time these copy photographs were taken, if you wanted to have photograph duplicated, the only way to do it was to take another photograph of it and have it printed.

There are some beautiful photographs in this section, ranging over a period from late Victorian to pre-World War II. These images suggest a very different era from the Portraits of the 1950s and 60s, when the world had been re-shaped by war.

If you have any memories of any places or photographs shown, please send them to us and contribute to our memory book to help us identify the photographs.

We don’t know the identities of many of the portraits, but we do know there are connections with other photographs in the collection. If they were stored together, or if we have found similar subjects, then we have linked the photographs together, so you can see all the other photographs they’re linked to.

See all the images in the Assorted Portraits category here.