Miles and Flora

Deaths Head Girls (With Mounts), 1915

So this must be why little girls dream of being princesses.  Here, on the left, in the garb of the Death's Head Hussars, famed German cavalry regiment, Princess Victoria Luise of Prussia--the only daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm--demonstrates her bloodthirsty, happy-go-lucky spirit.  She lived until 1980.

On the right:  Princess Cecilie, wife of Frederick William, Crown Prince of Prussia.  Cecilie--former Duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin--married the Prince in 1905 in a spectacular ceremony complete with 'artistically decorated procession through the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin.'

'Cecilie quickly adapted to the role of Crown Princess' (according to Wikipedia) 'and became popular both with the public and within the court. She is described as quiet but friendly, a natural beauty with an interest in fashion.'  The Pickelhaube suggests as much.   

Flower Drum Song

One of several stamp collage cards I've acquired lately.  Good, but also strange, the Euro-
pean-looking head on an otherwise 'chinoiserie'-style body.



Further pitfalls of mimesis: the ornamental vegetation on right might be 'read' as a waterfall, over which the little sampan here is about to plunge.

New Faces of 1906

Want the shirt and tie very badly.

White Clothes

Tintype of Tintype Collector

Yes, the collector had a tintype of herself made yesterday.  (More fun and less narcissistic than getting one's DNA through the mail?  Who can tell.)  Given the brutal honesty of the tintype plate it's actually hard to be too vain.  Through some strange alchemy of tin and chemical solution, the image shows freckles---everywhere--that were last seen when I was six years old. 

As close as it gets to seeing oneself dead.   Especially given 19th-century 'old weird America' look the process gives one.  She died in an asylum in 1911.

From a Zine

Photo of a photo -- one I took of an image by the marvelous Dutch photographer Anouk Kruithof.  This pic shows one of several page spreads from a zine by Kruithof entitled 'The Daily Exhaustion': a series of pictures, printed on large floppy newsprint, featuring this same  beautiful young woman in various states of sweaty-looking ennui, fatigue, acedia, tired preoccupation,  etc.

See Kruithof's website for some of her other works, including Becoming Blue,  one of the strangest and most haunting photo-books I've come across lately.