They are photographs hidden for decades at the back of dusty drawers which depict life at the Norfolk seaside in an altogether gentler era.
The images include gentlemen in blazers and crisp white slacks strolling along the clifftop at Gorleston and a young boy sporting jacket and tie as he carries his model yacht to the resort's boating pond.
Smartly dressed couples recline in deckchairs and even a mother and son building a sandcastle look immaculate.
Paul Godfrey, 64, of Lowry Way, Lowestoft, has combed internet auction sites to buy more than 500 old snaps taken by what has become an extinct breed in the era of package holidays and digital cameras - the commercial seaside photographer.
'While they were doubtless taken home as treasured holiday memories, most would have lain in drawers for many years before they were rediscovered in house clearances,' he said.
He has presented some of his favourites in a new book, Snapped at Gorleston-on-Sea, which focuses on three photographic firms, Jackson's Faces, WH Hastings and J Barker and Sons, whose snappers worked on the area's beaches and promenades.
Mr Godfrey, himself a photographer in the 1960s and 1970s, working at a studio in Great Yarmouth before moving to the firm Ford Jenkins in Lowestoft, said: 'A photographer at that end of the business was someone who tended to be reviled and looked down upon and yet what they did was record the social history of their day.
'It was a different time when people wore their Sunday best to promenade along Gorleston cliffs.
'I believe these photographers were undervalued and deserve their own small place in history and that was the aim of my book.'
The images give compelling glimpses of seaside life from the late 1920s up to the 1950s and 1960s heyday of Norfolk resorts.
The photographers were part of the history themselves and there is an image of one, Barry Drake, wearing his bright Butlins Redcoat style jacket that was the uniform of the firm J Barker and Sons.
The book traces the evolution of equipment used by the promenade photographer and the adaption of the cine camera for still camera use, taking a sequence of photographs that were printed in a strip of three.
Mr Godfrey reports that such walking photographs were taken on a speculative basis and the subjects were given a numbered ticket.
They were under no obligation to buy but enough of them did to make it worthwhile. In the early 1950s, the prints were sold for two shillings and six pence, 12 and a half pence in today's currency.
Barkers had stopped taking walking photographs on the streets of Great Yarmouth by 1980 but diversified into different areas of social and holiday photography, including having franchises at the Sealife Centre, Joyland, the Hippodrome Circus and the Pleasure Beach.
Mr Godfrey, who spent the latter part of his career as a local government officer, said it was the dawn of the package holiday era and the decline in popularity of British resorts that spelled the end of the promenade photographer.
He aims to bring out further books with the pictures he has recovered and is keen on organising an exhibition locally.
The book is available for £6 through several local retailers. Further information can be found on the author's website www.greatyarmouthphotographic.co.uk/paulgodfrey/
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