The Milk Bottle Diaries - Collections

When I was a child I was given three collections of items that had belonged to my mother before me – stamps, coins and matchbox tops.

The coin and stamp collections had been passed to her from her father, so a few of those items go back to the early 1900s. I chose to photograph a stamp from Helvetia, as that name used to fascinate me (plus, knowing that Helvetia is another name for Switzerland can come in very handy in a pub quiz!).

The matchbox tops were a special kind of collection. Mum asked her brother, who was in the Merchant Navy, to pick up matchboxes from each of the ports that his ship visited. I have hundreds of them from the 1950s! They would take the tops off the boxes and glue them into albums. It's a very unusual collection!

All photos from The Milk Bottle Diaries series are created in-camera with minimal colour retouching and no other image manipulation involved. To see the growing photo series, please visit the gallery HERE. Enjoy!

Instagram: @sarahritchiehq

Facebook: sarahritchieart