Four!

Today marks the fourth anniversary of The Passion of Former Days!

As usual, the occasion makes me go "wow." To be honest, I thought it would be something I dabbled with for a month or maybe two. The first time a post hit 100 views my jaw hit the floor. Now... four years, 462 posts, and 940,000 page views. The pace has slowed a bit from earlier days, but really that's been because of the blog's influence, too. Through this little endeavour I realized how much I love historical photographs, which led me to the decision to switch fields (from medieval history, of all places), which led me to a master's in Photographic Preservation at Collections Management, which itself exposed me to more amazing photographs that I ever could have believed I'd see (I've been inches away from the first daguerreotype!). I just accepted my offer of admission to do a PhD at Canada's top university, on snapshots. At the moment I'm working doing research with WWI images, which is very fitting, considering two of my first three blog posts were of WWI photographs. 

The moral is: you sure never know what decisions are going to be life-changing!

It's been absolutely wonderful to see this blog--and, of course, these pictures--get the feedback it has. There are so many great pictures out there, and after all these years and all this learning and all this experience I only feel that more. I love that there's people out there who love this too. Thank you for all the follows, and all the shares, and, most importantly, all the enjoyment!

FOUR YEARS!

© Crown copyright. IWM (RAF-T 6311)

Four planes of the RAF aerial display team the Red Pelicans, 1963-64.  Source

University of Washington Libraries

Four women in wood veneer bathing suits for a lumber promotion, ca. 1929, Washington (State). Source

© IWM (D 944)

Four Belgian children with jammy faces, London, 1940. Source

On the Playground

Kids (and some adults!) on a variety of old playgrounds. 

Oregon State University

Teenage girls on a playground, ca. 1945. Source

University of Washington Libraries

A playground in Seattle, ca. 1910. Source

Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest

A packed playground in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1946. Source

It Takes Two

Portraits of twins, from the 1850s to 1950s.

National Library of Wales

Twin boys "who milk their cow everyday to get milk for their cats," Llanderfel, Wales, 1959.  Source

Yale Joel, LIFE © Time Inc.

Twin sisters reading, 1963. Source

Reykjavik Museum of Photography

Twins in straw hats, 1909-1910, Iceland. Source

Broken Glass Plate Negatives

Another look at the ways a photograph's deterioration can have a striking effect on its image. From the 1850s to about the 1920s, the majority of photographic negatives were made on glass, coated with a collodion or gelatin emulsion. Though glass negatives capture a lot of detail, they are also bulky, heavy... and breakable. Broken glass plate negatives are not uncommon, particularly in the collections of archives where image content is considered especially important. Digitization has been a terrific boon for these broken plates, allowing the images to be put back together and viewed in a way that often is no longer possible another way. The creation of a digital positive is sometimes especially interesting in these cases, as the missing parts of the negative end up rendered black, creating an interesting visual. The cracks themselves can have a striking effect on the image, breaking the illusion of the photograph as an unmodified glimpse of reality. 

Bibliothèque de Toulouse

Porte d'Aude, Carcassonne, France, about 1859-1910. Source

US National Archives

Men gambling, Montana, US, 1909. Source

Costică Acsinte Archive

People with horses, no date. Source

Adventures in Wintersport

The end of another Winter Olympics! I really love the Winter Olympics-- for a lot of reasons (one of the big ones being I'm Canadian and we're good at them, haha), but most relevantly because they get us to watch and actually care about the kinds of winter sports most people never even think about otherwise. This blog has already covered such standard sports as skiing, skating, and hockey, so this post is dedicated to those 'weird' ones (plus a few classics I couldn't resist... plus a few winter sports just too weird for the Olympics!). 

We'll start with one of the odder (and one of my favourites): aerials! I have no idea when aerials became a 'proper' sport, but these fellows were certainly doing an early version of it in the 1950s!

J. R. Eyerman, LIFE © Time Inc.

Idaho, US, 1952. Source

J. R. Eyerman, LIFE © Time Inc.

Skier Jack Reddish, Idaho, 1952. Source

J. R. Eyerman, LIFE © Time Inc.

Skier Stein Eriksen, no date. Source

On the Telephone

Photos from the days when people actually used telephones to talk!

Nina Leen, LIFE © Time Inc.

A woman on the phone at work, US, 1947. Source

William C. Shrout, LIFE © Time Inc.

Chief of the Air Corps Henry H. Arnold on the phone at his desk in the War Office, 1940. Source

Martha Holmes, LIFE © Time Inc.

Children phoning "Santa Claus" at Schwartz's toy store, 1947. Source

Caught in Traffic

Ah, the good old days, when traffic was... as bad as now, apparently, just with different cars. 

Yale Joel, LIFE © Time Inc.

New York, Major Deegan Expressway, 1958. Source

Nationaal Archief

Holland, 1964. Source

Gordon Parks, LIFE © Time Inc.

A traffic jam in Paris, 1951. Source

Dmitri Kessel, LIFE © Time Inc.

Houston, Texas, 1946. Source

Al Fenn, LIFE © Time Inc.

Heavy truck traffic due to a railway strike, New York, 1951. Source

US National Archives

Honolulu, Hawaii, 1973. Source

William C. Shrout, LIFE © Time Inc.

New York City, 51st Street, 1945. Source

Carl Mydans, LIFE © Time Inc.

Regent Street, London, 1954. Source

Dmitri Kessel, LIFE © Time Inc.

Bangkok, 1950. Source

Co Rentmeester, LIFE © Time Inc.

Traffic in the downtown of an unnamed city in Indonesia, 1966. Source

Andreas Feininger, LIFE © Time Inc.

New York, pre-Christmas traffic on 5th Ave (including many double-decker buses!). 1948. Source

Michael Rougier, LIFE © Time Inc.

Greenville, Texas, 1948. Source

Andreas Feininger, LIFE © Time Inc.

Traffic Jam (no location given), 1951. Source

Andreas Feininger, LIFE © Time Inc.

New York City, 5th Ave, 1959. Source

Loomis Dean, LIFE © Time Inc.

Los Angeles, 1949. Source

William C. Shrout, LIFE © Time Inc.

New York, 1945. Source

Andreas Feininger, LIFE © Time Inc.

New York, 1954. Source

Cornell Capa, LIFE © Time Inc.

A messy traffic jam in Boston, 1949. Source

Ralph Crane, LIFE © Time Inc.

New York, Long Island Expressway, 1969. Source

Loomis Dean, LIFE © Time Inc.

Los Angeles (with a boy selling newspapers amongst the cars), 1947. Source

More Soldiers Sleeping

A sequel to this post (from almost two years ago now-- where does time go?). I always find photographs of soldiers asleep very touching. This photograph of a young soldier asleep in a WWI trench, in fact, is partially responsible for getting me so into old photographs. The emotional effect, for me, comes partly from the sense of sheer exhaustion you get from the men's poses, conveying the physical pressures of war, but even more so from the contrast between relaxed, sleeping, usually very young faces, and the context surrounding them-- the conditions and military apparel you see in the photographs as well as the wider wartime context the photograph fits into. Asleep, these men don't look like hardened soldiers off to fight for their lives; they look like young men who should be sleeping somewhere much better, not caught up in a war at all. 

© IWM (TR 1520)

A British lieutenant sleeps in the hay during fighting in Italy, 1944. Source

Larry Burrows, LIFE © Time Inc.

An American soldier asleep in Cambodia, 1970. Source

LIFE © Time Inc.

British soldier sleeping in a shallow foxhole in the Libyan desert, 1941. Source

Photographs in Terrible Condition

Most old photographs haven't lasted that well.If you have old family photographs, you don't have to go very far back to see colours changing, black and white photos fading and getting silver, scratches and creases and fingerprints. We get used to our older photos looking like this, even if they didn't look like that originally. However, most of the photographs we see from institutional collections are the ones in better condition, the ones where the deterioration has a lesser impact on the image. This is something of a mis-representation-- a lot of the ones in the collection do have deterioration that impacts the image. While it's totally understandable that large collections have to prioritize what to digitize and share online, it's also refreshing to see collections (usually archival ones) where the bad ones are digitized and shared just like the rest. The changing appearance of a photograph, even if it's negative, bears testament to the chemical and societal aspects of that photograph. 

On a less academic level-- sometimes deterioration looks just really cool. A pristine daguerreotype is wonderful, but a bit of rainbow tarnish around the edges can be quite beautiful. Between the silver and the binding and the base material, all kinds of weird stuff can happen. I encountered a box of unexposed dry glass negative plates from the late 19th century that had gone into these bizarre magenta patterns (I will try to remember to photograph this one day!). Emulsions peel off, negatives break, mould patterns grow. Sometimes the result is beautiful, sometimes intriguing, sometimes bizarre. 

All that said-- here is a selection of badly deteriorated photographs that I find visually fascinating!

A lot of these are digitally inverted negatives (digital technology is amazing for this-- giving access to an image you'd never be able to print!), accounting for some of the bizarre deterioration. The emulsion on a glass plate negative can lift, flake, crack, and shrink; nitrate negatives curl and crinkle and do all kinds of weird things as they disintegrate. I don't know specifically what's going on with a lot of these, but definitely those tendencies are factors in many. Mould seems to be a factor in quite a few as well (mould can grow on any kind of photograph with organic material, which is most of them except daguerreotypes). Some of them I don't have the faintest idea. I've included the material/process when it's noted, but I'm not even going to try to guess. 

Costică Acsinte Archive

Glass plate negative. Source

Bibliothèque de Toulouse

The nurse of the Propper (Santander) children, Luchon, 1895. Collodion glass transparency. Source

Bibliothèque de Toulouse

"Maison à tourelles, Uzerche." Glass plate negative.  Source

Posters, Photographed

While I love looking at old posters reproduced or displayed individually, this kind of presentation is often vastly different from the posters' original context. I always find it fascinating to see photographs of posters in situ, to see the places they were posted and the other posters they were displayed with (almost always many others, or repeats of the same). This blog has already had posts of wartime posters on the street and two editions of London Transport posters; today, a variety. 

National Library of Ireland

Ireland, ca. 1898. Source

Berenice Abbott, New York Public Library

Film posters outside a cinema in New York City, 1936. Source

Yale Joel, LIFE © Time Inc.

This only comes with the general subject heading "Posters - Greyhound Bus Poster - New York". Presumably 1960s. Source

Snowmen of Former Days

Whatever time period they live in, people are pretty predictable. Whenever it snows, the first thing they do is have a snowball fight. The second thing is make a snowman. 

Today, over a century of those snowmen! 

State Library and Archives Florida

Students at Florida State University, Tallahassee, pose around their snowman, 1958. Source

Library of Congress

Snowman stereo, ca. 1888. Source

National Library of Wales

A snowman in 1853 (salt paper print). Source