It was a remarkable rediscovery.
Stunning photographs, capturing working life in some of Norwich's most famous factories after the trauma of the Second World War, which had been stored in archives and almost forgotten.
But the pictures, taken in factories where hundreds of Norwich people were employed over the decades, have gone on show in a new exhibition.
Norwich Works: The Industrial Photography of Walter & Rita Nurnberg opens at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery on Saturday (October 21).
It was a chance rediscovery which led to the photographs moving from the archives to the gallery walls.
Dr Nick Warr, University of East Anglia lecturer in art history and curation was approached by a curator of the Museum of Norwich for his opinion on conserving a photographic album of workers at the Edwards & Holmes shoe factory, which used to stand in Drayton Road.
What he found was an archive of photographs of extraordinary quality which prompted further research into the man behind the lens: Walter Nurnberg.
Nurnberg had been a celebrated advertising photographer when, in 1947, he decided to change his career and embarked upon a two-decade-long project to document the industries of Britain, visiting Norwich four times.
In Norfolk Record Office, Dr Warr found more examples of Nurnberg’s work among collections dedicated to two more well-known Norwich industries.
Nurnberg had also photographed workers at Boulton and Paul, the Riverside-based company, which made an extraordinary range of goods – from buckets to aircraft.
He also visited the Mackintosh-Caley chocolate factory at Chapelfield.
His wife Rita processed and printed all his negatives.
Dr Warr and Dr Simon Dell, associate professor of art history at the UEA, held a public talk about the photographs, where an audience member spotted her grandfather in one of the Edwards & Holmes images.
It is hoped the exhibition, which runs until April 14, will help identify other people who were snapped.
Dr Warr and Dr Dell, co-curators, said: "The dramatic images made by Walter and Rita Nurnberg of post-war Norwich industry are distinctive for their vivid and empathetic portrayal of Norwich factory workers.
"With their stylized, monochrome compositions, the images of the past that the Nurnbergs have left us possess the immediacy of the present, as the hands and faces of the workers they depict still feel within our reach."
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