Decorating and Xeroxing

The price of decorating and photocopying in 1973 and how it compares to today

View from … a bygone age

John Lewis always had a big branch in Newcastle, but until 2002 it was called Bainbridge’s and in 1973 it was located in Market Street.

Your bill, sir!

 

Judging by this receipt, Bainbridge’s seemed like quite the place to get all your decorating supplies.

In 1973 you paid 41p for a paint brush (you can find one at John Lewis for £7 today).

Sandpaper would set you back 7 new pence (John Lewis doesn’t sell it today but you can buy some for £2).

I can’t read the other items but that seems like quite a haul of 8 goods, all for £1.72. Sorry, no computerised inventory checks yet.

All for 22 new pence

 

Meanwhile, here is a bill from the office at Tyne Tees TV for 15 photocopies. For “the Wall”, it says here. Price: 22p, 31^st May 1973. Nice to see payment in full by cheque.

Photocopying hadn’t reached its peak yet – think about all those Student Film Soc. Hand-outs, agit-prop leaflets, demos, marches, sit-ins, samizdat material from behind the Iron Curtain.

Xerox-ing technology was still in its infancy and quite expensive.

Teacher-led handouts, first-day-at-work rules and regs, sale-now-on leaflets and a myriad of promotional bumpf for shows, concerts, newsletters and bill posters were all yet to come.

Photocopying was to go through the classic technology arc that occurs in things like desktop computers, toasters and transistor radios.

Production at scale leads to a greater competition (Canon, Ricoh!) leads to lower pricing.

And eventually common-place banality or technology redundancy as cameras in our smartphones made photocopying irrelevant.

In 1973, it’s interesting to see how the office at Tyne Tees TV was charging employees for the service. That must have been to stop illicit freebie copying.

It’s also interesting to note that in 2024 you can get 15 photocopies done at a copy shop for £4.50. That’s quite a modest price rise, in comparison to, say, a paint brush.

But then, you’d have to find somewhere with a photocopier, and that’s quite hard in this day and age...

 

Yevonde - "Be original or die"

View From ... The Gallery

A new exhibition of the influential portrait photographer's work...

 Yevonde Middleton burst onto the photography scene in 1914 when she opened her first studio in Victoria Street, London at the age of just 21.

Yevonde - self-portrait

Originating from a well-to-do family in London, throughout her career she was simply known as Yevonde. 

From the 1920s until her death in 1975 she took stylish photographs documenting the movers and shakers in the British arts, fashion, politics and high society.

Her breakthrough came with the ability to take colour photographs using a new technology called Vivex. Invented by Colour Photography Ltd of Willesden, it entailed overlaying three negative plates using the primary colours of cyan, magenta and yellow. 

The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne is showing 150 examples of her work until April 20. 

As camera equipment and development in the 1920s and 30s were primarily studio-bound, Yevonde concentrated on taking colour portrait photographs. The prints were then sold to wealthy clients who had an interest in the subject sitting for her.

She obviously had a remarkable knack of putting her subjects at their ease with a huge variety of poses, costumes, and facial features with a high proportion of subjects gazing sidewards into the middle distance. It must have taken hours to arrange them in this way.

Colour portraiture

Business was good. Yevonde’s career coincided with an explosion in demand for pictures and photographs in newspapers and magazines. This was the post-First World War age of increased literacy and the cinema.

Of course, the most obvious thing to note was that Yevonde was a woman, a pioneering one at that, operating in a man’s world.

The exhibition doesn’t make a song and dance about this. 

Divided into chronological sections,  it effortlessly glides from her experimental beginnings through to her later years when she declared she “would like to pull her horns” from day to day photography.

Experimental photography such as 'double-headers'

Celebrities of their day such as George Bernard Shaw, Vivien Leigh, the Earl and Countess of Mountbatten and John Gielgud are all captured on camera at this show. In amongst them are dozens of portraits from a bygone age of aristocrats, high society figures, debutantes and actresses.

But then there came a change. During the Second World War the invention of Kodachrome killed off the Vivex colour photography labs overnight. Kodachrome was more advanced, easier to use and, importantly, enabled colour photography in the field, not restrained by studio-bound kit.

The demise of Vivex signalled the end of Yevonde’s unique brand of colour portraiture.

However, the exhibition continues to show her post-war output with a range of fascinating work including a surrealist spell and black and white studies of swinging sixties intellectuals and influencers of their day.

“Be original or die” was Yevonde’s battle cry. This exhibition certainly shows why.