A record of us: Waterford photos from down through the decades
I started in the newspaper industry in 1990 but it was a hobby before that. For my sixteenth birthday my parents bought me my first camera. An Olympus OM 1.
I worked in a clothes shop, an arcade, a restaurant.
I took photos as a hobby and then people started asking me to do communions and weddings.
When Waterford Today opened up, they approached me to see if I would do photographs for them. I hesitated on that. I felt it wasn’t my type of photography; I was only doing it as a hobby. I didn’t know if I would be good enough for the newspaper end of things.
Then I did freelance stuff for the Waterford News & Star. When the photographer left in 1994, he asked me to take his place.
I told the editor at the time, Paddy Gallagher, ‘look I’ll give you hand and we’ll see how it works out’. He was happy with me and I was happy with him.
Waterford has changed big time. City Square used to be houses. There’s been two new bridges since I started working here. John Roberts Square used to be a two-way traffic system. Everything has changed.
When you look at shops that have now closed down, the clothes people wore, the cars people drove, at the time that didn’t mean anything. But sixty years later, we can’t believe it.
It’s the same with the pictures I’m taking now, in sixty years, when people reprint them, what changes are there going to be in Waterford that we think are never going to change?
We just don’t know what the future is going to look like.
This year we were lucky to be able to rescue some of Simon Farrell’s photographs. Simon was a freelance photographer in Waterford. He also worked for the national papers, and he would have done film reels for RTÉ. His daughter-in-law contacted us and told us she had two boxes of his photographs in her shed. She was very happy to give them to us to see if anything could be done with them.
Unfortunately because they were glass plate negatives, a lot of them were after deteriorating over the years. We couldn’t rescue all of them. In the boxes I had, there were probably thousands of photographs, we managed to rescue two or three hundred of them.
Looking at the way people were dressed, the ones we got were from the late 50s, early 60s.
This is a way of keeping Simon’s spirit alive. People are going to see his photographs after so many years of them sitting in a shed. Simon did the same thing in his day as I’m doing now; recording events in Waterford.
And I want to tell the people of Waterford to hang on to the negatives that you might have. Because they might not realise it but that’s history. If anyone has old negatives and they want to do something with them, we’d be happy to put them in upcoming books.
You’ll recognise people in the photographs that you don’t know. The kids in school today look so similar to their parents or grandparents. When I’m reprinting photographs, I ask myself, ‘Where do I know that child from?’. The photographs are from the early 60s; I can’t know them because I wasn’t even born then. And then I’ll realise I know that person’s grandchild.
No. The photos in our archive date back to 1962 up until the present day. We haven’t used anything from the 2000s yet. We only use photos that are at least 25 years old. The next book is going to have pictures from the year 2000. There’ll always be pictures that people haven’t seen yet.
The people. Meeting the people of Waterford, real people out there. Meeting everyone, from young kids up to people celebrating their 100th birthday all in one day. You get to know them all, and they know you. One person said to me, ‘Joe, you’re an honorary family member.’ I photographed all their kids, from their first day of school to communion, confirmation, school play, school certs, graduation day, all the way up to their wedding day.
You meet a lot of people who become friends and family to you.
