A CHANCE discovery of family photographs taken during the Cold War era in Germany has inspired a new book by a Bolton artist to evoke the same feelings today as the photos did in the 1950s.

David Gledhill, a senior lecturer in fine art at the University of Bolton, has reproduced the photographs through paintings which capture life before and after World War Two and explore the nature of surveillance.

He was given the family photo album containing pictures taken in East Germany as a Christmas present in 2005 — it had been bought from a flea market.

From 2009 and 2013 he turned 30 of the 57 of the snapshots into large-scale oil paintings.

He drew on the talents of fiction writer Nicholas Royle, who is the creative writing lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, to create stories around the images.

The two explore the nature of surveillance through Mr Gledhill's monochrome paintings and Mr Royle's short-short stories.

The book In Camera centres on a doctor's daughter's experiments with her father's camera and eavesdrops on his consultations.

Mr Gledhill said: "The album was put together in about 1957 as a fifth wedding anniversary present for the daughter of a doctor from East Germany.

"It was a sort of 'This is your Life' commemoration of this young woman's family home in Teutschenthal in Saxony Anhalt before the Second World War.

"Her father had photographed every room in the house, including the corridors, and it reminded me that I had done the same thing when my father was in hospital at the end of his life.

"For me it was the only way I could think of stopping time and hanging on to a sense of family, and the German photographs seemed to come from the same impulse.

"But they also captured small town life before the rise of the Nazis and also the postwar communist era so they have a kind of elegiac quality, like images of a lost innocence.

"It was this double edged meaning that inspired me to work on the paintings.

"The doctor also reminded me of my Grandfather who was a policeman in Bolton before the war."

He added: "I love Nick's stories and I think he's captured the austerity and claustrophobia of the time really sensitively.

"For me, although the issue of surveillance is timely and important, the main theme is the relationship between the doctor and his daughter. I have a daughter and parenthood brings out a protective instinct that makes for some really tender moments in the stories."

In Camera has been published by Negative Press London.

Mr Gledhill's current project is about the athletes' village that was built for the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The exhibition will be in Berlin in July, after which it will transfer to the Olympic Village.

Find out more at www.davidgledhill.co.uk