Monkey
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.
Happiness. Happy American people. Is happiness complicated, or is it simple enough that it can only be complicated?
Photo guy. Pana-Vue Slide. 1950-something. One would hate to have gotten into this business during the mid-1990s. Well, maybe not. A lot has changed in photography but the local photo shop has a lot of services to offer that it never would have imagined just 10 years ago: prints from slides, prints from digital cameras and memory cards, and the always valuable photos-on-coffee-cups.
I love this picture. This is one of over 900 slides I recently posted, showing windows into the lives of an American family living in Germany during the 1950s. In this picture it looks like daddy stopped the car to take this beautiful shot of his daughters in front of the Neustadt Weinstrasse — a large vineyard. The license plate on the car reads “U.S. Forces in Germany” and helped solve what was, for me, a bit of a mystery as to who these people were. Being an Army Brat myself I identified with the adventure of being an American child whose earliest memories are from far away lands. My memories center around Laos, and the American School of Vientiane where my sister and I went to school. I was too young to have memories as articulate as (I would imagine) those of these 2 girls, who seem to have spent a large part of their childhood traveling overseas. You can click this picture (or click here) to see larger versions.
This is a strange and fascinating picture. Two girls from the mid-west are seen on a beach in Florida engaging a flock of seagulls in what looks like a dangerous, Hitchcockian confrontation. The long shadow of the photographer lurches into the frame, and several stains and some water-damage clutter the sky. This is from a box load of slides formerly owned by a mid-west family and sold at an estate clearance earlier this year. The slides smell musty and gross, a rank stench which seems to indicate that they came from a smoking household.
