Tintypes: Injuries No Longer Felt

Something more or less odd in these three tintypes: man with strange 'backwards' arm; boy with perhaps one eye (?); a crosseyed girl.   Again: the medium invariably adds its melancholy aura.

Pith Helmet, Dead Thinker, Intense Baby Girl with Shrouded Mother

I'm currently putting together a little book of some of the tintypes in my collection.  Hadn't looked at them for a while and I marveled anew at their strangeness and humanity both.


Man in what looks like a kind of pith helmet (though without mosquito net).

Unknown Dead Thinker and (?) Raconteur.

Marvelous little girl--her hands in her lap in almost the same position as those of the Dead Thinker.  This is what's known as a 'Shrouded Mother' tintype: meaning that someone, usually the mother or nanny, has hidden herself under dark drapery in order to hold the child or baby motionless while the image is being produced.  (The pinched drapery here suggests that the mother is holding the girl's head just behind the ears.)  Extraordinarily eerie, of course.  Also unsettling: the child looks like someone I once loved very much.

A Concrete Thought

...in a concrete shade?  Proto-Amy Winehouse hairdo, attentive and intelligent poodle, flowery artist's smock, fake plants and an easel: what more could one ask.  Was this early 1960s publicity postcard a one-off or did other concrete-block manufacturers of the era also favor such alluring promotional material? 

Fascinating how the pattern repeated in the blocks evokes both the swastika and the 'radioactive' warning signs of the Cold War.  My elementary school had such signs, yellow and black, in every room.  Go to nearest fallout shelter at once.

Two Silhouettes, One Hundred Years Apart

Two recent acquisitions.  The first shows a British soldier in profile, WWI vintage.  His head is cut out of black paper and has been glued on the card.  An actual silhouette, in other words.

The second is in turn a representation of a silhouette: the poet Goethe, Werther-like, contemplating the image of a young woman.  The portrait itself is by Georg Melchior Kraus (1737-1806).  Interesting how Goethe always looks like the same person no matter who is drawing or painting him: he must have been a fairly distinctive physical type.  As opposed, say, to Keats, who looks very different from portrait to portrait.  On the (few) Keats images, see the marvelous study Posthumous Keats, by Stanley Plumly.

I Too Await You

Alas, a JPEG can't do justice to this awesome card: not only is the woman *embossed* her fetching black top is rendered using some strange, velvety-feeling paper. (Or is it thin fabric?)  Something with a pile.

One of those photographs where the more you look at it the less and less photograph-like it becomes.  The backdrop would seem to be false or else painted over, judging by the chalet.  Only when you look at the woman's hands--and possibly the details of the face--do you 'intuit' the photograph that at some point must have been taken.

Your Crew Awaits

John Wordsworth---

----the distinguished Bishop of Salisbury, 1885-1911.

A nice old English cabinet card (though the right arm looks a bit peculiar).  Grand-nephew of William Wordsworth, to whom he would seem to bear only a slight resemblance.  Indeed:  imagine said Reverend with tight synthetic jersey top in place of vestments, a shaved nearly-bald head, and sporting an aerodynamically designed bicycle helmet and you realize this is actually Lance Armstrong in clerical drag.

Did a few odd reworkings the other day.

Champagne Label Pants & Hat

RPPC from the Land O' Dreams

Ozymandias

Another former denizen of Cecil Court.  Classic indeed clichéd subject but starkly composed and the pale purply chromo-lithography is lovely.  How can one not adore the tiny camel lower right?

Funeral Week

February 1952: The Princess Elizabeth on the way to the funeral of her father George VI.   (Marked up press photo.)  I first saw this haunting image in the recently published  facsimile of Cecil Beaton's scrapbooks.

Here for my uncle's funeral.  London cold and sunny today, New Year's Day.  Chatting with a lady in an antiquarian print shop on Cecil Court: mad as a hatter.  She kept complaining about 'people who didn't understand her shop' and 'didn't belong.'  She had hundreds of old postcards of Marie Studholme --every one that had ever been printed, it seemed.  Alas, I'm afraid I did understand her shop. 

Back When Glaciers Were Glaciers

Umbilical Hernia

From the Collector's Corner:

Not exactly a postcard, but such signs have recently become a serious collecting sub-genre; rather like those crudely printed 'Money for Food, God Bless' cardboard signs held by homeless people standing on traffic medians or slumped on sidewalks.  The Folk Art of Today. 

This is an especially heart-wrenching example--15 lb. 'therapy dog' Shih Tzu (with umbilical hernia and missing tooth) has look of transcendental horror.  As he must have looked one imagines when man ran off with him--chillingly--'under his arm.'

1920s Hollywood Scene With Burro

Don't know the film alas.  Script checking going on.  That's supposed to be a mine in the background.  I'm presently in Western Mexico in one of the largest mining towns of the 19th century-- aka Puerto Vallarta.  Hoping to see Anjelica Huston but it ain't happened yet.

Throttle Open

Several airplanes in my future in the next few weeks--I hope none exactly like this.  However I think I might now be prepared.  Taught two graphic memoirs this past quarter, Spiegelman's Maus and Bechdel's Fun Home, so I am now a terrible bore about semantic alternations between caps and handwritten script, space management of the individual frame, stylized temporal indicators (as in the first and third box here), deployment of traditional visual emblems--the big puffy Boreas-cheeks blowing out the winds here--and...---you get the picture. 

When Doves Cry

For Everyone. . .

. . .who's ever been dissed for lookin' good.  Some strange draftsmanship nonetheless.  The mopey gal in back seems to have the forearm and hand of a stevedore--proportions all wrong, too; her arms must be about four feet long.  Definitely a Hairy Ape type.   And, gee, I wonder why the artist has, it seems, modeled the 'Stephen' character on Katherine Hepburn in profile?

Truly Terrifying Trade Card

Seneca: evidently much read in Kansas.  All I can say is 'Go Way From Me!'

The Cyclops

It's taken a few days--but here are a couple of these cyclops-like newspaper wire service photos.  The 'P' in 'A.P.' must stand for Polyphemus.

Oh, yes, building at left is a concert hall in Detroit; the one below, Maria Theresa's breakfast chamber.