In The Sunny Long Ago. A Photo Album of Old Newfoundland
By John Doyle.
A review by Greg Locke.
July 7, 2025.
ST. JOHN’S, NL – It is important for us to remember, even for those born into the digital or social media age, that photography was not always ubiquitous, easy and cheap. It wasn’t everywhere and people did not display every mundane aspect of their daily lives on the Internet for the world to see as if it was some breaking news or important documentary. I don’t feel contemporary photography is that special anymore because of this.
Photography fulfills many roles in our society. A technical art form and means of personal expression for some. A visual documentation of news and historic events in the hands of journalists. A recording of culture and society by academics. A tool for nostalgia. A reminder of times gone by. Big or small. Complex or simple.
GERALD STANLEY DOYLE
Into this digital image world comes John Doyle’s book, In The Sunny Long Ago. A Photo Album of Old Newfoundland. A resurrection of images from Kodak Kodachrome Super 8 motion picture film shot by his father, Gerald S Doyle, while traveling the coast of rural Newfoundland between 1937 through 1955.
Gerald S Doyle (September 26, 1892 – July 12, 1956) was prominent businessman and trader. He was also a publisher and a broadcaster. He began publishing the Old-Time Songs and Poetry of Newfoundland in 1927, giving them away free of charge in the outport communities and including advertisements for his business endeavours. The Gerald S Doyle songbooks are still found in piano benches in Newfoundland homes.
He launched the Gerald S. Doyle News Bulletin on the radio station VONF in 1932, which aired information of personal interest to outport fishermen. Doyle is often credited for the popularization and modern perception of Newfoundland folk music.
In 1938 while in New York City he bought a Kodak Cine 8mm movie camera and rolls of Kodachrome motion picture film at Macy’s. An early colour film known for it bright vibrant colours.
He took that camera and film on his travels around the coast of Newfoundland. Documenting the people and fishing villages as they were in their hay days …or fish days.
Not until the 60s and 70s would Newfoundland become the subject of professional documentary photography and photojournalism with newspapers and magazines sending photographers from Canada, USA and Europe to tell visual stories of this remote rural place in the north wet Atlantic ocean.
MAMA, DON’T TAKE MY KODACHROME AWAY
Kodachrome and even cameras were not a common thing in Newfoundland in those days. Especially not outside the city of St John’s. Which made photography and motion picture of the era rare and valuable as a document and archive of Newfoundland culture and society of the time.
John Doyle, a writer and film maker, took these reels of film and spent years getting individual frames digitized and printed.
This is not a simple task. The 8mm film is pretty small and digitizing it requires special high resolution digital scanners to extract reasonable quality still images. Even with that, a frame by frame scan is painstakingly slow to achieve good results. It took Doyle many years of research and waiting for the technology to complete this process.
Another feature of Kodachrome film was that its special dye process that Kodak invented gave it excellent longevity. Properly kept Kodachrome is known to survive over 50 years without fading or breaking down under normal conditions.
LET THE PICTURES SPEAK
Photographs and motion pictures are two different visual media creatures They are perceived and effect people differently. Psychologically. Humans react to them differently. Still images burn an image into peoples mind and create a more solid memory. We know this with studies done on how people remember historical events. People remember the still photos, not the “movies”.
Motion picture or video is a fleeting sequence of time. While remembered, its not as often seared into memory.
So, what happens when we freeze an image from video or motion pictures? Motion frozen in time to allow us to fully process the scene. Isolate the moment and let us absorb it. ?
This is what John Doyle has done with these frozen moments from his fathers films.
It is an amazing collection of photos of a certain time in Newfoundland that we should remember or know. They show a lost Newfoundland with familial faces but one we can all imagine listening to stories of our grand parents and those who lived them.
For a collector of Newfoundland photography, art and history is is a must have book.
Are these images as sharp and clear as our images of today? No, but neither is our past.
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Greg Locke is a professional photographer and journalist with 40 years experience and who has spent many years documenting rural Newfoundland for national and international news media organizations since the 1970s.
This book is published by Flanker Press in St John’s, Newfoundland. Please support local bookstores where you can. If you choose, you can purchase this book online at Amazon.ca with this link.
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Great article Greg on John Doyle’s book of super 8 still captures – just ordered the book. I’ve a keen interest in this as I’ve got a hard drive with a copy my Uncle Jim’s super 8 films from pre & post resetttlement of our family from Merasheen in ’68. Colour and resolution- wise it seems to be a goood quality transfer that my cousin had done after Jim died but the films were pretty dirty from many projections over the years and weren’t cleaned during transfer. I’ve done some still capturing of frames using VLC Media Player and can get about a 2 MB tiff file from it but would love to know how to get the best from them. I completely agree with your observation of the difference in photographs and motion pictures and stills having greater power to sear into memory the impact of the content. I was completely mesmerized by some of the film frames I saw for the first time when I received them a few years ago and immediately tried saving frames of the best films. Hopefully John’s book will tell how he achieved the best quality captures from his father’s films.
Not much there about the technical process but it was professionally done at a film lab.