With judging underway for the Society’s Alfred Vowles Photography Competition, it is a good time to report on our work in the archive over the last year to explore the life and works of this important early twentieth century photographer of Exmoor.
In the archive, we have a collection of around 1,000 photographs taken by Vowles, who generally used a glass plate camera. A local historian, Joan Astell, bought the glass plates in the 1980s and arranged for the Exmoor National Park Authority to photograph the plates on to 35mm film. She used prints of these photographed plates for a series of books on Minehead, West Somerset and Exmoor. Later she donated the glass plates and the 35mm negatives to the Somerset County Archive. Several copies of the 35mm negatives were made, and we are fortunate enough to have a set in our archive.
To make the images more accessible to researchers, we have been digitally scanning the 35mm negatives, a project we hope to complete very soon.
We have also been looking into other aspects of Alfred’s life and work. He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical and the Royal Astronomical Society, and a prolific writer of newspaper articles, mostly on Exmoor. He also gave talks that were broadcast during the early years of BBC Radio. When he retired from his photographic business, he dedicated the next ten years to studying and preserving ancient monuments on Exmoor, serving as the first secretary for the West Somerset branch of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society, formed in 1935. There are many stories yet to tell about this extraordinary man.
Graeme Horn and Janet Beattie, Archive volunteers
