Tag Archives: vintage photo

Horsing Around in the 1930s

This image was poorly exposed and blurry; I had to squeek out as much as I could using Photoshop — I’ll bet the young lady being tortured in this photo was happy to see that this photo didn’t turn out originally…but she had no idea that 70 years later somebody on a computerized internet would […]

Enid Brant, Scrapbooked

All we have to go on is her caption: Enid Brandt, San Francisco’s Child Pianist. Her photo comes from the Pennsylvania Report Scrapbook, what we’d consider ‘altered art’ today. The book was originally the “Pennsylvania Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1895,” but an industrious photo-lover cut photos out of magazines and glued them […]

Arrangement in Gray and Black: Melby’s Mother

Whistler’s Mother (otherwise known as Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1) is an iconic image in our culture, recalling a Victorian silence and respectability. Mrs. Melby’s Mother, above, spent Halloween 1960 at a bowling alley. My, how times change is a little less than a century! Not quite as much as you may think, […]

Swimming at Mt. Tello

This photo is captioned “At Mt. Tello“. The rest of the series are from Wisconsin, so I assumed there must be a Mount Tello somewhere in the area. Google, sadly, has no results, but it sounds so familiar…Mt. Tello…Tello Mountain…Mount Tello — and a light turns on above my head. Along Highway 23 in central […]

Trompe l’Oeil At The Pfister

Say ‘hi’ to Larry & Ruth Smith, frequenters of the Pfister Hotel. This was taken in February 1957, along with several other photos I’ve uploaded. This photo has the best view of the trompe l’oeil wallpaper in the Pfister. A different wallpaper is visible in other photos, but this the best view of any of […]

Claiming Her Own Nickname

Here, to the right, is Ruth. She once had a photo album of her life in the late 1930s, which I’ve started scanning recently. On the second page of the album, she has a series of captioned photos captioned as a dramatis personae, identifying the players in her life. Her self-portrait includes several nicknames — […]

More Scenic California

Well, here we’ve got an entirely different view of the Harbor Freeway (compared to a few weeks ago). California’s pride in their municipal freeways was immense: in theory, they provided an escape from the crowded streets of other metropolitan areas, and allowed for relaxing suburban living while working in the city. Today, we see this […]