Oh, You Hairy Beast You!

From Scotland, home of champions of the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" competition, comes this quite old glass negative contact print of the Highland breed, a product of Mother Nature and natural selection without help from man. So, of course, it is disease resistant, requires little special feed or care, is mild tempered and can survive where other "man made" breeds will die.

It was used by American breeders early on to improve their stock and is found both as a pure breed and as the foundation of many other breeds worldwide. The Highland is the oldest registered cattle breed (1884).

All cattle descend from the Aurochs which have been around since way before early man decided to paint their portraits on the walls of caves. Tasty, too, so I hear!

Being Cool, 1900

What is noteworthy about this image? The short answer – not much.

The long answer is that it is quite typical of such graduation portraits of young women of the late 19th and early 20th century. Most notable is the solid stance, both feet on the same plane; one foot is not pointed forward nor is there any consequent lateral tilt to the hips (not that the fashions of the time would reveal much, since by then the cinched wasp-waist was out of fashion, and much improved skeletal and muscle health was the benefit.) Very high heels were also not the fashion.

This is not to suggest that young women were unconcerned about the physical image they projected; on the contrary, hair and dress and adornment were as important as ever, but with reliance on a modest comportment; the importance of appearing “sexy” or “hot” as in our time was decidedly “uncool” in proper society, but it made itself evident in advertising and in popular entertainment even so (just not my daughter!)

When I began work on this photo, I discovered that the smudgy flaw on her left hand was actually a ring with a sizable stone.

Wanting to be naturally desirable has existed since prehistory; all cultures and times have their ways.

Ready, Set, Pull, Dammit!

The Chicago photographer who took this photo and stamped his name on the back assumed that any idiot would know what he/she was looking at. This idiot does not!

More than a century after the fact, this “strange” to our eyes exercise has several perhaps far-fetched theories that have occurred to me, all of them fraught with flaws:

1. Is this training for a firefighting team?

Early fire companies did indeed pull hand pumpers manually (before the days of steam pumpers, and don’t ask me why a hand pumper couldn’t be pulled by horses?) with large crews dragging the heavy machine through the streets, but the images I have seen show an extremely long wooden wagon tongue with lateral crossbars that the pairs of men pushed against – not a harness like we see here! Obviously extricating oneself from a harness when you reached the fire was not conducive to getting down to the business of putting out the fire.

(Indeed, firefighting was about the most extreme macho vocation around in the years before mechanical pumpers; there was fierce pride in the stamina needed to drag a pumper through the streets and pump the machine to maintain pressure in the hoses – so much so that the crews absolutely refused to use the steam pumpers at all, delaying more effective firefighting sometimes for decades! So much for the search for intelligence in the universe.)

2. Is this research into human pulling power?

How many men are needed to replace an ordinary team of horses, perhaps? Hardly scientific. The wagon does not appear to be loaded with weights, and what is the superstructure meant for, and why are there men manning the wheels. I think I’ll opt for a little horse sense!

3. Is this some sort of sophomoric team training for a bizarre competition, along the lines of bed or bathtub races?

University students since the middle ages have been known for seeking the most non-intellectual activities they could think of as relief from their studies, to raise the ire of professors and administrators, and dispel any popular notion that higher education was something it made sense to pursue. There is a high solid board fence around this enclosure, so perhaps these men were considered a threat to public safety!

4. Fill in the blank: _____________________________________________________.

If you know what the hay is going on here, please enlighten the rest of us. And thank you!

Funerary Photography

Our 21st century attitudes about life and death have set us at a cultural and philosophical distance from even our recent ancestors. My father, who lived to be 95, remembered as a child hearing older women say, as a common fact of life, how many children they had had and how many they raised – death was a given rather than an exception. Diaries from the past record death with an acceptance that surprises us.

Why would collectors want these funerary images? Nearly from the beginning of photography it was natural and traditional for families in some cultures to keep photos of death just as they did of life, so any collection that reflects how people have used the camera must have a few such images. Many immigrants brought the tradition with them to America. This image came from Colorado and it is likely that it was taken there.

A photograph is a visual record, but without a written record we are left with suppositions rather than facts.

Studying this image tells us quite a lot. This is a farming community, likely a settled and prosperous one that may have many members who came from Europe, but it may not have been established long enough that there is a fenced cemetery with rows of headstones; the emptiness of the landscape is striking.

The community is gathered in support of the family of the deceased (funerals are for the living even as they remember and honor the dead); the coffin rests on simple chairs from a dining room or kitchen; the minister stands at the foot with the church or community elders behind him; the immediate family is seated behind the coffin. The key to the scene is the chief mourner seated at the head of the coffin, overcome with grief and comforted perhaps by his brother or close relative; the deceased may be his young wife, but could be mother or father. The other faces tell us that this is an event that they have taken part in their entire lives, and no one, except the very young here, have been untouched by death.

There is also a tradition of photographing the dead, either alone or at a wake with family around them. I have one or two of the latter, but I am personally put off by the former because I prefer visual memories of people in life, so I don't own them nor will I post either on this site.

But the photo above is about life no matter how difficult it may be.

Old Palace Yard, Parliament 1900

One of several glass negatives of London and other UK locations taken by a family that immigrated to Boston and traveled between the two countries regularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (sad to say that I was woefully outbid on many I wanted from that collection when it was sold recently.)

The blowups below are of the wagon driver checking the security of his load of lumber, a tiny automobile just to its left that is truly a carriage with a motor instead of a horse, and the statue of Richard Coeur de Lion by Marochetti placed here in 1860 (the Victorians loved all that was romanticized in their history through writers such as Sir Walter Scott and Alfred Lord Tennyson). There is also half of a busy little dog exiting on the lower right.

To most of the world, images of Parliament are as iconic as our Capitol in Washington or the Kremlin in Moscow.