Keith Harding started his photographic career in 1965 and opened for business as 'Goodness Gracious' in 1972.
During his 35 year career Keith has developed a passion for local history - particularly in the collecting of old photographs. Pride of place amongst these belongs to the 800 glass-plate negatives taken by Walter Rose of Westcott, near Dorking, in Surrey.
Goodness Gracious also prints from an even earlier group of 50 images made by Guildford photographer John Chaplin. Most of these glass plates show scenes of Dorking around 1890 and are some of the earliest surviving negatives of this Surrey market-town.
During the Covid 'lockdown' period Keith used the time to make digital scans from all of these precious negatives meaning that they could be safely stored away under archival conditions; Walter Rose's negatives have been donated to the Surrey History Centre and John Chaplin's are now with Dorking Museum, allowing Keith to continue to produce high quality prints from digital images without risking damage to the glass-plate negatives.
Finding early negatives is an extremely rare occurrence and most collectors rely upon Edwardian picture postcards to form a pictorial record and the Goodness Gracious archive now has more than 2000 of such images depicting the towns and villages of south-east Surrey.
