A cellist from 1943 looks through the cracked pane of a glass-mounted slide. Her name is Yolanda, and this slide is dated May 15, 1943.
Kid in a Clown Suit.
More than the ambivalent child in the clown suit I looked for who and what is on the television. When a human being took up a full screen on a television screen in the 1950s it was for something important. Today television is a rimshot.
Man Standing In His Garden, 1942.
Something I have taken for granted these past months while scanning hundreds upon hundreds of slides each day is the fact that many people think of America in the 1950s and 1940s as being in black and white. Kodachrome gives the lie to that assumption and shows what we did, of course, know. We know that life was in color before color television and color movies, but how often do we see or pay much mind to real-life color images from the 1940s?
This slide is dated 1942. At 67 years old this is the oldest slide in my collection.
A friend recently made an interesting point about slides. He said that slides differ from prints because “that piece of film was there.” The scrap of film used for a Kodachrome slide was actually there where the picture was taken.
That’s kinda cool.
People are busy. People have other things to think about. People have chips to dip and nothing — nothing — to look at.
