I am very pleased to have been entrusted with the extensive archive of slide photographs created by Roy Haslett ( 1921-2008) – pictured below in southern France 1973.
This is a brief biography of his life and photography written by his son Martin:
Born: Portsmouth 1921
Died: Cheltenham 2008
Roy showed great promise in science subjects at school and went on to graduate in Physics at Reading University. For his war service he was put in charge of radar stations in India which started him on his future career as a research physicist, specialising in underwater acoustics. It was also in India that he discovered his passion for photography. At first pre-war supplies of film were available but when those ran out he adapted his camera to use unexposed movie film from the Bollywood film studios.
Back in the UK, Roy was soon taking colour slides and continued to do so for the rest of his life. His travels, with his wife Margaret, were first around the British Isles. When car ferries to the continent became available, they travelled independently, first in France and then further afield. As the years
moved on they looked for a more relaxed way of exploring and found Swan Hellenic cruises could take them to many famous historical and archaeological sites, some of them well off the beaten
track. Roy’s slide collection reflects these stages of his life, from family holidays in the UK, through tours of France and Italy and on to the Mediterranean and more exotic places in North Africa and the Middle
East.
I have started back at the beginning in the early 1960s with quite a tight edit of slides of various family holidays in UK and Ireland, and moved on to the images of France, Netherlands, a few of Bergen, and next will be Italy. This has taken me up to the mid 1970s. This is a first edit picking out a number of slides from each Kodachrome box – there are plenty more to come when I work through them more methodically. I’ve tended to select those pictures which show historical change through the vehicles and the appearance of people rather than ones of landscapes or buildings. Several hundred of Roy’s excellent images are now on Geography Photos in a gallery of his name.
Please follow the link to see the photos.
I have a favourite and that will be the subject of another blog. Which do you like best? Please do feel free to ask any questions or make comments.