It is always an interesting question, what object would you save if you had to exit your home quickly because it was burning down.
For me, this is particularly interesting, as I am severely disabled, and getting myself out would be an interesting challenge.
If I were in bed, I would be able to contact the emergency services through the panic button that I have attached to my wrist.
This would enable me to call either emergency services, or my first named contact, which is a carer that lives just a few minutes from where I live.
So it is a difficult question without a straightforward answer, however, for the sake of answering the intended nature of the question, I would reach for a photograph that hangs in my kitchen.
I do not know the person in the photograph, but I have in some strange way adopted her, as a kind of honorary family member.
It is not that I do not care to keep photographs of my closest family, far from it.
Although I do not have that many photographs, as my sister is rather camera shy, and my elderly mother is equally camera shy these days, far too concerned that she cannot appear as glamorous as once she did.
She is after all in her 90s, and I remember how embarrassed she was when she once confessed to me that she could remember as a young child of about 13 queueing to see the first ever talking film.
As she lived most of her young life in the east end of London, this may well have been in the early Thirties, rather than when the film was first released in 1927.
My mother was born in 1919, and this was very much a confession, of which she was rather embarrassed because it revealed her age.
I on the other hand felt quite privileged to have had this fact shared with me, and it is one of those extraordinary reminders that elderly relatives can provide an almost direct link across vast stretches of time.
The photograph that I would save was purchased by me some years ago, when I lived in Glasgow. My then partner and I lived close to a regular auction house, and every fortnight and auction would take place which always included many small items that had probably simply been cleared from the homes of the recently deceased.
This particular photograph has always intrigued me, and I have often referred to her as my enigmatic woman.
It is a studio photograph from perhaps the 1920s, and it is of a relatively young woman, perhaps in her 20s. She is wearing a fur stole, glasses, and is clearly well to do and perhaps unafraid for a studio photograph to show that she wears glasses.
Perhaps hinting that she is proclaiming that she is an intelligent woman, unafraid to be seen with something that hides her face to a limited extent.
Although the spectacles are those kind of glasses that do not have solid frames, and are therefore obscuring less of her face than might otherwise be the case.
So why the importance of this photograph to me?
This is difficult to give a direct answer to, quite simply she is someone that I have felt an interest in over the years, and there are questions that I would love to have answered as to whom she may be.
The only clue has been the frame within which the photograph is mounted.
I had hoped that their would be a name of some kind pencilled into the cardboard frame, but there is not.
However, there is a clue to her identity from the name of the photographic studio that took this studio portrait.
It was taken at the Lafayette Studio, and a small amount of Internet research enabled me to identify quite quickly a little about this company.
And this has only served to increase the enigmatic nature of the person captured in the photograph.
The studio had branches in Dublin, London, and Glasgow. It was founded in the 1860s, and finally closed in the 1960s.
It seems that the great majority of the glass plate negatives from the studio in London were saved by the fact that some rock musician in the late 60s observed that they were simply about to be trashed, when the Studio closed and everything was being cleared away.
He had the connections and foresight to ensure that the glass plate negatives were temporarily stored at the Pinewood Studios, which presumably had the space for such a speculative set of objects to be stored. They must after all have taken up quite a lot of space.
It seems that the Victoria and Albert Museum quickly became very interested in what the pictures in the collection represented, because it seems that the studio were well known for having photographed the wealthiest people of just about every year between the studios opening in the 1860s through to the 1960s.
And thus the overall collection represents a fascinating insight into fashion for this entire period, specifically for the fashions of the well heeled, and indeed many of the photographs proved to be of the crowned heads of not just European royal houses, but also Royal families or their equivalent from every corner of the British Empire.
And one of the very interesting collections within the collection is of a fancy dress weekend held at the seat of the Duke of Devonshire, Chatsworth, one of the most magnificent country houses in England, and the guest list represents an extraordinary social selection of the great and good. All photographed by the Studio, who had clearly been required to send a photographer to catalogue this extraordinary event that took place in about 1910.
My curiosity about whom this woman might have been, was of course raised enormously by this discovery. And many of the photographs in this extraordinary collection can in fact be seen online on the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
This meant that I have been able to send a copy of my photograph to the specialist curator at the museum, and in fact we exchanged a couple of e-mails. He had not seen this particular photographs at all before, and had no idea of whom it might be.
But he agreed with me about my suggestion that it was from the 1920s.
And no doubt as an expert in fashion and costume across this span of time, he must be right.
So, I was no closer to identifying my enigmatic woman, but her enigmatic qualities have only been enhanced.
I don’t think I can have paid more than about £16 for the photograph, but it is one of those found objects whose value to me is irrelevant to its financial value, it is simply something worth keeping.
As indeed were the rest of the contents of the studio stock when it was simply destined to be thrown out as rubbish.
