It was early days of home movies when Newfoundland businessman Gerald S. Doyle purchased a Ciné-Kodak camera at Macy’s in New York City in 1938. Though film for the camera was expensive and had to be sent to Kodak for processing, and there was no sound, early home movies had one significant advantage: Kodachrome. Twenty years before colour snapshots became common, amateurs could capture movies in Kodachrome’s rich tones.
Doyle’s new movie camera became his constant companion during his travels around Newfoundland. With a keen, observant eye, he recorded life in Newfoundland outports over more than twenty years through the immediacy of a focused lens. The 300-plus photographs in this book are frames extracted from those colour films, laser-scanned for high resolution. These images invite readers to accompany Doyle as he sailed into tiny, isolated communities and documented a bygone era centred on the sea. The pictures chronicle a people during the last days of Newfoundland as an independent nation and the early days of being a Canadian province, from 1938 to 1955.
Step into the sunny long ago with a patriot who loved his country. Gerald S. Doyle’s photographs will intrigue those curious about Newfoundland life as they explore one man’s remembrance of things past.