Fishing Trip
c 1920s (click to enlarge)
The dog, to me, really makes this one.
Vintage Snapshots
the wondrous world of vernacular photography
Category: 1920s Photos
September 17, 2014
On the Run
In motion, c 1920s (click to enlarge)
June 22, 2014
Early Photoshop
“Gracious! Look at us.” (c 1920s)
The face is on a piece of paper that has been glued to the back and shows through a hole cut in the photo.
June 14, 2014
“There!”
Zabriskie Point, Death Valley, c 1920s (click to enlarge)
February 23, 2014
Some Favorite Portraits
A random grouping of a few recently acquired shots that I think will remain favorites.
Beatific, c 1920s
Porch, c 1920s
Flanked, c 1920s (click to enlarge)
August 6, 2013
Branching Out
“Mantlers” (c 1920s)
Another in the “Backgrounds” series (sample here). While many of these of course seem inadvertent, I have to wonder whether they weren’t trying for this one.
June 20, 2013
Light Waves
1920s beach scene (click to enlarge)
Summer is about here.
June 19, 2013
Horsing Around
Photo album page, c 1923 (click to enlarge)
September 11, 2012
Dueling Cameras
Brownie battle (c. 1920s)
The camera in at least the woman’s hand in this great shot looks to me to be a 1920s Kodak Brownie No. 3, Model B. According to what I have found online, the camera was produced from 1908 – 1934, but the trigger guard visible below her thumb was added to the Model B from 1920 – and the rest appears to match that particular camera, as shown below.
The way it used to work
Kodak’s Brownie No. 3, Model B
June 28, 2012
Two-Wheeled Horsepower
No horse needed (circa 1920s)
Following on from my last post, on a very early automobile being scrutinized by some people from their window, here is another transportation-related shot involving a transition between eras. It looks like it was probably a good way of getting around. The people in the car certainly seem intrigued.
I have always been curious about the period in which horses, buggies/wagons and cars coexisted, and several years ago met a man in his mid-nineties living in Covina, CA (near where I grew up) who described arriving there from Texas (via a just-opened Route 66) about 1927. He said people on horseback were still somewhat common in that small town at the time, though I don’t know about buggies or wagons.
I came across a sort of charming description of the transition to automobiles in a rural town in a 1960s book called The Situation in Flushing by Edmund Love:
“At the time of my birth, in 1912, the village of Flushing, in Michigan, was still in the horse-and-buggy age. There were only five automobiles in the whole village . . . it would be difficult to say just when it was that the automobiles outnumbered the horses and buggies on Main Street. The farm wagons disappeared one by one and the cars took their places, but I have always felt that I looked up one morning and found it all different. There were no horses and buggies left. Instead of five automobiles in the town there were five hundred.”
Vintage Snapshots 