Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: 1970s, friends, grief, independence, mother
four girls
After my mother graduated high school in 1969, she got her first taste of independence: a front desk job at the Hilton downtown and a two-bedroom apartment with four other young women. She talked so much about those times in the last years of her life that she became mired in nostalgia, happiest lost in memory. Recently I found the photos in this post among her albums, and I try to match the stories she had told us over the years with the people in them: parties full of weed and wine, wearing micro-mini skirts to work, dancing late at a club called 2000 (I think) over in the North Side – eventually meeting my father at the Wooden Keg, now a Dunkin Donuts. I never had a god-like illusion of my parents that others may have had about their own; they had always been refreshingly — sometimes painfully — human.
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joy ride
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Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: painted backdrops, tintype, trompe l'oeil, victorian
father and daughter
I’ve been obsessed with trompe l’oeil paintings since I was a kid, begging my mother to create an entire forest scene on my bedroom wall (I still want one!). When looking through old photos, I sometimes buy them just for their painted backdrops. Our friend Steve tipped me off to collector Jim Linderman‘s The Painted Backdrop: Behind the Sitter in American Tintype Photography, which provides a great history on this very subject. The photos featured in this post are from our own collection. The tintype above is my favorite for many reasons – the bored expression and unladylike pose of the girl, the cigar that her father is holding, the unintentionally exposed wooden beam holding the backdrop. Painted scenes are like fairy tales, as if while turning the pages of the book I am reading, I can walk right into it and escape into another world.
at the window
Jeff's great-grandfather William Dye
a girl from Prague
sisters
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Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: 1970s, mother's eye, mysteries, vernacular photography
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My mother’s photos are mysteries. No captions scribbled on the backs of them, telling us date and place, so this leaves me wondering why this place or person, that moment. Many of the photos I’ve scanned and posted from her albums over the past year are photos I’ve seen for the first time because she had them hidden away from all of us. I’m most touched and surprised by her creative eye. I thought some of the ones I found last night eerily mirrored ones I may have taken on road trips with Jeff.
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Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: 1970s, birthday, free spirit, mother
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My mother was never one for ceremony, but birthdays were different. Birthdays — particularly *her* birthday — turned into birth months, and for weeks leading up to the event she’d drop hints on all the gifts she wanted. She always called me on my birthday, recalling details of my birth: how much I weighed, what time I was born, how difficult I was to bring into this world. We’d laugh; not much had changed. I had grown into a complicated woman, and it is only now that I accept how like my mother I am: stubborn, independent and curious, relishing solitude. We don’t want to admit as we get older that we have become clichés — our parents. Today I’ll celebrate the day of her birth with Suzy-Qs and a can of Pepsi, thinking about how much I miss her since she’s been gone.
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Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: eastern european, nesting, vintage winter photography
The back of the card says, "Zuski girls/Needham and Howard Nelson" or something close to it, the writing is difficult to read. I purchased this card in Savannah a few years ago and on that 90-degree day, it gave me winter.
I’ve taken a few weeks’ break from creative pursuits to do some nesting. Making potato soup, hand-washing musty vintage dresses, eating Sheryl’s pickled turnips for breakfast right out of the jar while standing at the back door, waiting for quiet blue mornings to turn light.
I spent more time than I care to admit watching good and bad entertainment – episodes of “Ancient Aliens,” Breaking Glass and Foxes, for some late-70s nostalgia. Not all I watch is gloom and kitsch though; I have a soft spot for historical dramas, and finding Everlasting Moments was a beautiful surprise. It’s a Swedish film about a working-class Finnish woman in the early 1900s who wins a Contessa camera in a lottery. Through mothering seven children with an alcoholic husband, she finds solace in photography. The moment when her first picture turns from white paper to sepia image in the developer bath (a gorgeous shot of her shoeless, bewildered children sitting in their tiny kitchen) made me cry a tiny joy, reminding me of that excitement I get when the image that I see in my mind can be shared with others.
This photo makes me think of that time in history when photography had an aura of magic about it.
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Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: 1800s, collecting, mystery, oval frame, studio portraits
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When Jeff and I go trash hunting, we automatically split off – he retreats to the basement for bargains or shop tools, and I sit on the floor among stacks of books, thumbing through old cookbooks, or, with a box of photographs in my lap, hoping to find that one creepy picture that the seller dismissed as junk. Some people think it’s weird that we own so many photos of people we don’t know, but for me, the mystery is part of why I love them. I wonder about the history of the people in these portraits, and in organizing them to fit a theme, I’m reminded that my obsessions with collecting are in the details – a wild-eyed face-off with the camera, a delicate, swollen cheek or the faded writing on the back of a card, telling me her name.
margaret coleman
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Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: all souls' day, funeralia, post mortem photography
funeral home advertisement, 1920s
If death is just a natural part of life, then why are we so afraid to talk about it? Jeff and my interest in pre-1930s American mourning culture may stem from our own fears of death. I used to get panic attacks thinking of my mortality, and now, through reading about funeral practices, and my own grieving, I am learning to accept the inevitable. Part of the fascination, too, is the “ordinary” treatment of death, to the point of kitsch, like the advertisement above for Wilfred F. Reeves Funeral Home. The little girl appears sweet, if somewhat sinister, in representing the “# 1″ funeral home where “distance is not too great for our services.” The funeral business was a bustling industry for photographers producing cabinet cards and portraits of the dearly departed, for the bereaved to save their tears in glass vials to pour over the graves of a loved one on the first anniversary of his or her death. It was disrespectful to avoid public displays of grief, unlike today, where there is pressure to keep grief a private matter.
19th Century Art of Mourning - Online museum of Victorian mourning culture and practice.
Teardrop Memories – Antique store with an exhaustive collection of mourning jewelry, windows’ weeds, coffins, skulls, grave markers and post-mortem photography.
german mourning RPPC, 1911
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cabinet card of funeral flower arrangements, 1896
Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: black & white, photobooth, vintage
pre-1925 penny strip
I took a chance a few years ago at a flea market and bought a batch of vintage photographs for a few dollars. In that group, I found the postcard above, with tiny photo booth-like pictures of a woman, posing for someone. Her boyfriend or husband? Herself? I love her expression in the far right picture, how she is somewhat unsure of the camera. And in examining how she cut and arranged the photos on the card, this was most likely the last photo taken in the series.
The photo booth came into existence in 1925, but her hairstyle and dress looks earlier to me. So where was this photo taken? Barbara Levine’s Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album provides a few clues. She says that tiny photos like these were taken and processed by studios or itinerant photographers and collaged into pocket-sized albums. The placement of the photos in the albums suggested short animated films.
I also found a picture among Jeff’s family photos, taken in the 1950s (he isn’t quite sure who it is) , and included one of my mother from the early 1970s. I could do a whole photo series on her many hairstyles, they were pretty amazing.
1950s
1970s
Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: 1970s, mother, mourning, secrets
my mother and my godmother, 1971
In the immediate months after my mother died, I spent a lot of time with her through ephemera – old letters and greeting cards, scraps of paper where she jotted down her thoughts. The most painful to look through was the most recent evidence of her everyday life: doctor appointments scheduled in her day planner; a copy of The Awakening still in a Barnes and Noble bag; the new watch she got for Christmas from my aunt Lorraine, still ticking next to her glasses on the kitchen table. It is much easier for me to reach into her past, to understand her life from where it began so I can understand how it ended. And as these months go on, I’m realizing that it will be a life long process, that most of what I discover will be of my imagination, filling in the blanks because she is not here to answer my questions. And also knowing that even if she were here, that I would still be filling those blanks because she kept so many secrets. I find photos like the one above, hidden behind other photos in their frames. It makes me laugh because she is so happy and beautiful, and curious because it’s hard to imagine that only a few years after this picture was taken, she became my mother.
Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: 1970s, kennywood, parents, photo booth
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Check out my groovy parents at Kennywood, 1973. Twenty-one years-old and not yet married. They had no idea that less than a year later, they’d have a daughter. They had no idea as my mother sat on my father’s lap in the booth, waiting for the camera to flash, that they would have my sister four years later, that their marriage would fall apart in seven years. They didn’t worry about growing old or if their love would last. For them, it was just this moment on film, in a tiny photo booth which no longer exists. I think about this when I look through our old photos because I remember very little about the four of us as a family. I think about how young they were, their disappointments and dreams.
