Views around Europe from the 1970s and 80s

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to pick up some medium format colour slides showing views around Europe which had been taken in the 1970s and 1980s.

There are a total of 50 slides, and all of them have been annotated on three sides of the slide mount with the country, town and location where the picture was taken, with the year the picture was taken written on the fourth side. This is a collector’s dream because it should be possible to find most of the views on google street view and get a direct comparison to the same view today, and being medium format, the images are very good quality.

The only down-side to this find is that the slide mounts seem to be of a quite solid construction and difficult to get apart. Now normally, that would be seen as an advantage, but some of the images have dirt trapped inside the glass, and also quite a few of them have ‘newton’s rings‘ showing where the film has stuck to the inner surface of the glass. Ideally, the slide mount needs to be prised apart and the glass and film cleaned before they are reconstructed. This is easy on the normal 2 part slide mounts, but has proved to be more difficult on these firmly made units. I suspect I can get them apart, but so far I’ve left the job until I can devote the proper amount of time to do it properly. For this reason, some of the images shown below have noticeable rings in the scans.

The slide mount issue aside, there are some really good images here, with the majority being of Italy and France, a few from Holland and Belgium and all, as I said above, within the date range of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s. I suspect by the quality of the images, the accuracy of the exposure and the fact that they were taken on medium format film at that date that the photographer was either a professional, or a very serious amateur. By that time most people had switched to 35mm with only photographers interested in the absolute peak image quality using 120 slide film.

The images from Europe shown in the gallery below are just a sample of the 50 or so in this series; I hope to get more scanned once I manage to find time to separate the slide mounts to clean them. In the meantime I hope you enjoy looking at these views around Europe from the 1970s and 1980s