>>4023692I believe that particular photo is somewhere in the English midlands, although I can't pinpoint it specifically. The majority of the collection is from England, Scotland and Wales, with a few sets from Scandinavia mixed in.
The purpose of these photos has always been a mystery to me, since they're so different from his other work in terms of subject, techniques and the tools he used. His jazz portraits were mostly taken with a Graflex press camera, and were carefully staged and posed to use his limited film supply as efficiently as possible. Besides the major difference of being 35mm color slides, when you look through the collection you can see him taking several shots of each scene to get just this right result, and there are a lot more candid shots. For every image I scanned, there are usually at least three or four more of the same scene as he works to get the best result.
After he retired from his jazz work, he founded a company called University Films, which produced educational film strips. That name appears all over the boxes that the slides are packed in, alongside Gottlieb's name, so I have to wonder if he was out there taking shots to be used in his films, or if he just took a bunch of vacation shots during a tour of Europe and had them delivered to the company's office after processing. For a while I was afraid that they were taken by some other person affiliated with the company, but I found several examples of Gottlieb's handwriting online, and it's a match for the handwriting on the slides and boxes. There is so little information online about University Films, and I haven't been able to find anything remotely like a complete list of their releases to see if they produced one on Britain.
