Family Portrait

An old albumen print mounted on a card. The card is damaged, and also the print. There is a date, 1929, written on the card, but the clothing, and the tricycle look more like the late nineteenth century to me.

A French Postcard

A real French postcard, not a modern day, screened reproduction. Printed on photo paper, probably smuggled into the United States.

Sixties Hair

As much as I hate to admit it, I'm old enough that a lot of images that show other eras, are from my lifetime. When I was a kid, a lot of high school girls wore their hair this way. Clearly a school portrait from the mid 60's.

Yale Aviation

Another of the old rotogravures (I think) from World War 1. The caption, "General view of the Yale unit's aviation station at Huntington Beach, L.I. ) I would guess that the L.I. stands for Long Island, New York.

More Girls on Bikes

My guess would be that these photos are from the forties or fifties. Two girls riding their balloon tire bikes. The photographer put himself in a good position for a nice action shot.

A Little Boy In Curls

It was one of the stranger customs of the second half of the nineteenth century for little boys to be kept in effeminate clothing and long curly hair until they got to be a certain age. It was a big deal for these young boys to get that first hair cut, and move onto more masculine clothing. It's very hard to read from the scan, but stamped on the border, "Durand Wisconsin, and Raitts" Raitts is probably the name of the photo studio where this picture was taken. This is another example of some digital repairs that I had done when I worked at the photo lab. There was a bit of foxing and some other very minor flaws corrected, and then I had a fine black & white negative made, and then I made a conventional print.

U.S.S. Wyoming, World War 1

As I noted in my post of 9/26/09, I have a number of these images from World War 1 that I think are rotogravures. Normally I wouldn't buy pictures cut out from a magazine or newspaper, but these intrigued me. Whatever printing process was used, the images are not screened. Take a close look at photos in newspapers and magazines, and you'll see tiny dots. Because of that, I knew that I could get some nice copy negs, and eventually make conventional black & white prints. I'm also interested, because in World War 1, Woodrow Wilson practically took over the media and turned America's newspaper and magazine into propaganda organs. Something that wasn't done in World War 2, or Vietnam. The first image shows both images as they appeared on the paper. The other two are separated, and a little bigger. The caption for the image on the left is, "Full steam ahead. View of the U. S. S. Wyoming." The right image is, "Coaling ship."