Cat Fight!

These have got to be from the swinging seventies, and the sexual revolution. As a long time collector of old photographs, and as a former lab tech, I can attest to the fact that sexual imagery in photography goes back to age of Daguerre. The one thing I always ask myself when I see something like this is, "Was it done by an amateur for his own private pleasure, or was it a commercially made photo, printed for under the counter distribution." The only clue with these images is that one of them is fogged, which indicates that it might have been an amateur effort.

Alabama Police Wedding

I don't have a lot of wedding pictures in my collection, but this one was too interesting to pass on. Probably from the mid to late fifties to early sixties, this image shows the groom and best man in Mobile, Alabama Police uniforms. One of the things that, as a collector of old photographs, I often find myself doing is speculating about the people seen. These two gentleman, officers of a deep south police force, during the civil rights movement; looking at it, I couldn't help but wonder if the groom went from his honeymoon to beating civil rights marchers.

Old Heidelberg, Chicago, Illinois

I have a number of these old souvenir photo folders in my collection. It was once fairly common for people to go out to night clubs or restaurants, where a photographer, usually a pretty young woman, would take peoples pictures for a small fee. The perfect remembrance of a night out.

I've done a little web surfing and have found plenty of references to an Old Heidelberg restaurant at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. This could be the same place, but there is a Sept. 20, 1949 stamp behind the photo. Printed on the back cover, "IMPORTANT WASH this photograph in running cold water for 30 minutes as soon as possible. This will make it permanent." What's really interesting about this particular photo is that there seems to be an African-American lady standing just behind the seated gentleman.

Men In Skirts

Entertainers or two guys on a lark. Who knows, maybe they lost a bet. Perhaps they just like to wear women's clothing. I spent years working in photo labs, and I don't think I ever had a week go by when I didn't get some sort of picture of naked people, people in some sort of sexual situation or men dressed as women. My guess is that this photo was probably taken during the twenties or thirties. I can see the skirts, but the shoes?

One Young Lady Over 20 Years

You don't find a collection like this too often. Photographs of the same young lady, in essentially the same pose, taken over a period of twenty years. I haven't spent a lot of time around children in my life, so I'm not very good at estimating their ages....I'm making a wild guess that the first picture was taken around age five. So that would make the last image of a young lady aged about twenty five.

There are dates written on the borders. In order, 1922, 1928, 1929, 1931, 1932, 1934, 1935, two from 1937, 1938, two from 1940, and 1942. Born around the end of World War 1, the last picture begins not long after the United States entry into World War 2.

Montana Glass Negatives

One of the reasons that I hate antique dealers is that they break up collections of photographs to increase their profits. I purchased these images in Montana. It's kind of the dream of all photo collectors to discover a large collection of images from an unknown, though clearly, talented photographer. Looking at this group of images, I think I may have found one, but with only a handful of the negatives still left together, we'll never know. I think the image of the farm family one of the strongest photographs I've ever seen. The portraits of the cowboy and beekeeper are amazing. I showed these to a movie costumer who dated the clothing to the late 19th to early 20th century. Because there is no mother in the farm scene, I think the photographer might have been the mother, making her glass negaties, at home, in the kitchen. Click on images to see them in a larger window.

I used to work in a photo lab where I had access to an 8x10 enlarger. I was able to use it to make high quality blow-ups. These images were made directly from the negatives, rather than copy negs made from contact prints.