Artist in focus: Cath Tate and the Photocaptions range
This week our artist is focus is the one and only Cath Tate and her range of Photocaption cards. Cath founded Cath Tate Cards in the early 1980s and started producing the first Photocaptions designs around 20 years ago.
With a background in photography herself and a love of ‘old things’ Cath began collecting old Edwardian Photographs and couldn’t help but see the humour potential in some of these very sombre family photographs. In the late 1990s she began adding funny captions to these images and colouring them up, to create the card range we now know as the Photocaptions cards.
Each image in the range uses an old photograph from the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s and other bygone eras and each image in the range goes through a process of careful colourisation, bringing life into these old black and white images.
Back in first half of the 20th Century, home cameras weren’t commonplace, if you wanted a family snap shot you would go to a professional photographer. It was common for families to have professional photographs taken and turned into postcards. The family could then send out a photograph to other family and friends of the new baby, marriage, important birthday or other significant event in the family calendar.
These historical postcards are the images used across the Photocaptions range with a caption added by Cath Tate to give the images a modern humorous twist.
Now with over 500 designs in the range the Photocaption range is still a bestselling range for us and ranks in the top selling humour cards for many shops. Seven collections from the range have been published as popular books. Over the years the Photocaptions have been many times imitated but never surpassed in their unique style and sense of humour.
