A collection of photographic print wallets, items which seem to turn up in boxes of discarded photographs having lasted several decades. The three Ilford wallets are typical of the firm’s output, and the “For Faces & Places” motto appears on all of them, while the older engraved design was updated to include typical British holidays snaps, so Houses of Parliament, an English village and a shot of a Pelican at London zoo! All focused on black and white film and date from the Forties and Fifties.
There are dozens of variations on the Kodak wallets. The older of these two is from the 1950s and has a nice simple pen and ink sketch of a young woman on, checking her prints. The famous Kodak logo was in use for decades. By contrast the much simpler white wallet is from the 1980s, and much larger to incorporate the bigger prints labs were supplying then, as well as the longer 35mm negative strips. It’s quite a clean design, not unlike some of the graphics used by Polaroid.
Lastly are two very different photo wallets from Timothy Whites and Taylors, a branch of dispensing chemists formed in 1935 from the merger of two older companies (they were later taken over by rivals Boots The Chemists in 1968 who changed them into homeware shops but closed these in the mid-Eighties). The older of the two is quite astonishing to modern eyes, but the illustration of two African natives taking each other’s photograph was used for many years in the 1930s, perhaps a nod to the story that many tribes thought photographs stole their soul. By the Fifties they had switched to a more modern looking wallet and borrowed the Kodak colours while doing so.
A second gallery of wallets is on the site. There is also a look at a Kodak wallet illustration.
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