Where it all began

Our mum, Greta, always liked to say that she was the one who introduced Dad to photography. She was the first to own a camera back in the 1950s, when they were still courting.

We still have have one of her old albums – those old-fashioned ones with thick paper pages and pictures stuck in with black gummed corners — which is filled with her early photos.

That first taste of photography clearly sparked something in Dad and it wasn’t long before he decided he needed a camera of his own — and I suspect, knowing him, something a bit flashier one than Mum’s! So sometime in the late 1950s, he became the proud owner of a Kodak Retinette. Amazingly, we still have it, and it remains a pretty cool piece of kit in all its vintage glory.

The story goes that our late Uncle Fritz — Swiss, and newly married to Wendy, Dad’s sister — brought the Retinette back for him from one of his trips to Switzerland. And with that, Dad’s lifelong adventure with photography began.

One of his earliest and best-loved shots is this photograph of Uncle Fritz and our cousin Karl engaged in some very precarious fun – a picture our aunt still has hanging on her wall today!