© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Old envelopes, old businesses

When we first acquired some of the late Ken Magor's vast collection of photographic negatives, many of the negatives were stored in second-hand envelopes that Ken had evidently scavenged from a variety of Newcastle businesses. Ken clearly needed something to store the negatives in, but in the late 1940s - in the wake of the war - many items were in relatively short supply. Ken was a master scavenger and he gathered large quantities of used envelopes from the printer Reg Pognoski, from the retail store Winns and from other sources as they became available. After…

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Putting a label on it: ephemera from all over

Pretty pieces of paper. I like them. So I've made a collection of them, gathered from all sorts of places. I like the artistry of them. Sometimes I see some humour or something peculiar in them that makes me collect them and put them in albums, occasionally to look at. Here's a selection of some of my paper ephemera. Beer labels - all Australian. Some older iterations of products that are still around, and some others not so much. My Dad was a KB drinker, in longnecks and later in those gold cans. Back in the…

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The charm of local ephemera

Ephemera - items that were made for brief and fleeting purposes and never intended to last a long time - has always interested me. Perhaps it comes from working at a newspaper, where the product you work hard all day to create becomes, famously, tomorrow's budgie cage liner or chip wrapper. Is it the tiny glimpses ephemeral items give of times and places distant or lost? Or is it the design effort that went into making them appealing to the eye of buyers or users? Probably both, plus an element of compulsion in the personality: the…

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