Lazy Guide to Net Culture: Historic pictures

Published on Monday 20 March 2006 15:41

Being a Scot, I'm fascinated by the past. This is probably because that is where all our country's good times are.

This may sound contentious but I work just up the road from the depressing monument to incompetence that is the Scottish Parliament: a building that came in late, looks like the St James Centre, cost 400 million and is falling apart. It is also suffers from being packed with apparatchik loyalty monkeys from the lower strata of the big parties. As a keen supporter of devolution I find it perpetually depressing that after 300 years of waiting for our own parliament we screw it up by letting old-style political non-entitities run it.

So I like the past. And I like photographs of the past. (Oh and please don't offer to sell me genuine bona fide photos of the Battle of Bannockburn. I'm not falling for that one again… )

I've discovered a newspaper website that has a fascinating historic collection of photos. It is The Birmingham News. Not Birmingham as in the ugly sprawling Midlands conurbation but Birmingham as in Alabama - as in one of the main battlegrounds of the US civil rights movement. Its "Unseen, unforgotten" collection contains fascinating pictures of the struggle against racism. As well as images of demonstrations and speeches there are more sinister scenes as well, including the search for the bodies of murdered campaigners James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

In a supporting article the paper is open about the limitations of its own coverage of the time:

Eighteen years ago, in a centennial edition, The News made this observation about its coverage of the civil rights movement: "The story of The Birmingham News' coverage of race relations in the 1960s is one marked at times by mistakes and embarrassment but, in its larger outlines, by growing sensitivity and acceptance of change."

Organizations outside the state told Birmingham's story before the local media…

"More than anyone else, New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury forced The News and the entire Birmingham white community to confront the reality of the racial conflict," according to The News' centennial special published March 13, 1988. Salisbury's profile of the city appeared in The Times on April 12, 1960, under the headline, "Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham."

Such bravery and openness is rare among newspapers.

Bravery - combined with tragedy and hope - is also evident in another set of pictures, this time from the near past.

At WarShooter.com ("a portal for photojournalists covering conflict, crisis and disaster"), a photographer has an interesting record of the Indian Ocean tsunami:

Slightly ahead of the one year anniversary of the Tsunami I decided to return to Thailand and shoot every image taken the year before from the exact same angle.

The result shows how Thailand has recovered from the devastation but also powerfully conveys the horror of the events.

It also puts into context the petty local difficulties we in Scotland face.