Assault on Eyeballs

Ultramarine used as a weapon of mass destruction?

This is Gertie Millar, the popular English stage and music hall actress (1879-1952). Has been called 'the most photographed woman of the Edwardian era.' Later in life she became the Countess of Dudley.

The hat alone could wreak havoc.

From the 1930s

Love the man's costume, lower right.

The Terrible Bathing Suit

Anonymous hand-tinted photograph. From Germany. Jawohl!

Daddy O

This one was scary enough as it was: I put the creepy greeny-yallery tint on it. 1930s mugshot. And yes, every other looks like every other other.
An extraordinary novel I read too long ago: Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes. The subject here: standard- issue thug or syndicalist?

On Brown Paper

And the lovelier for it. Some bits of 19th-century ephemera. They fell out of the plastic bag as a trio, so I've kept them together.

Daisy Liked Pansy

The sort of joke that--at the age of six--I considered the height of drollery. Afraid I still do.

My great-grandmother apparently had a glass eye, which she took out one day to show my mother, who I believe then fainted.

A Golden Couple

Toddler Falls From Window

A deaccessioned newsroom photo showing the scene just after an 18-month-old child, has fallen from a 5th-story window. Where, when, what happened next--I don't know, only that the event took place in the 1950s.

The dramatically charged relation between the three adults in the image--the mother (left), the doctor, the bystander--puts one in mind of 18th and 19th-century 'History Painting.' Human beings frozen, terribly, in space--even as they elicit our pity and fear. And moral apprehension (the slightly frightening-looking doctor). A crazy kind of Deposition.

I Feel Especially. . .

. . .Svelte Today. Though as my Pilates instructor informed me yesterday, I need to work on my Vestibular System.

The Experiment

Bought this from a Berkeley photo dealer a while ago. He told me the (unnamed) photographer had devised a new kind of color film--this was the 1940s--and the image is one of the test prints. Something tells me too much cyan and yellow.