Hi All,
The lack of authentic Titanic interior photos can be accredited to two major points.
The first being that the ship was never open for public inspection as Olympic was before her Maiden Voyage.
This, combined with the fact that she was only open the press for a brief period of time on sailing day before the passengers boarded, and these tours were all pre-arranged as to what areas would be visited and for how long - so due to this, many photographic opportunities were regrettably missed.
The second reason can be attributed to the fact that Titanic was only in service for four days, so any photos other passengers who did not disembark at Queenstown, may have taken unfortunately went down with the ship. Had the ship made it to New York she would most likely have been open for public inspection and many more interior photos would exist.
However, I have another theory as to why there is such a shortage of photos.
A great historical travesty was committed during the First World War as far as glass plate negatives are concerned.
Not many know of this and I spoke of it in an earlier post about an authentic non Olympic photo of the Titanic Grand Staircase.
Gas masks were a high demand item during WW I due to the frequent use of both Mustard and Chlorine Gas attacks on the part of the both fronts, and one of the main components of these early gas masks were the thick glass goggles for the eyepieces.
To save time and effort, not to mention to deprive the world of ever seeing thousands of rare and unpublished photos, glass plate negatives deemed “unimportant” at the time were donated from archives and the like to the war effort to be used for this purpose.
Due to this, I feel a lot of historically significant photos that could answer a lot of history’s mysteries today were destroyed in this process, the extent of this loss is not fully known as the images were not catalogued or even previewed in most cases before being discarded.
In the worst case scenario, photographic glass negatives dating back to the late1850’s all the way up until 1914 were subject to this loss.
While it is just a theory that can’t be proven one way or another, but I feel may glass plate negatives of the great liners of the era, Titanic and Olympic included, were lost in this process.
Photos that weren’t deemed significant, or were discarded due to being out of focus or damaged.
Despite being damaged or out of focus, photos of areas never before seen on Titanic and Olympic - provided they ever existed, would be invaluable to answering many of today’s interior design questions.
Best Regards,
Brian