07.21.07

A Beetle with a View

Posted in PhotoBlog: Forgotten Slides at 1:00 am by thomas

A somewhat mysterious slide from September 1959. I found it in a box with architectural slides of San Francisco’s Mission District, but if this is San Francisco, then it is a part of the city I have never been to. It’s not shot on Twin Peaks, since you wouldn’t see these tall hills in the East if we assume that this is around sunset time.

That’s a sharp looking late-50s Volkswagen Beetle this couple was taking up into the hills. Sunroof, white wall tires and a radio which was probably playing some Henry Mancini tunes at the time.

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07.16.07

The Office

Posted in PhotoBlog: Forgotten Slides at 10:30 pm by thomas

I’ve recently received a new batch of forgotten slides from the late fifties and early sixties. Most of them – actually a lot more than I was expecting – were from a single epic trip of a New York couple to South America. I’m still picking through those, but most are very common vacation pictures.

But there were a few gems in the boxes, too. Here’s a visit to an office in the Chrysler Building in New York in 1963:

Here’s the president of the company…

…the manager with his secretary…

…and the number crunchers.

03.29.07

What’s Going On?

Posted in PhotoBlog: Forgotten Slides at 12:03 am by thomas

A slide taken somewhere in Europe, maybe Paris, in the early 1960s…

Makes me want to join, rise to the tips of my toes in the back and whisper “What’s going on?”

03.26.07

The Beach

Posted in PhotoBlog: Forgotten Slides at 11:34 pm by thomas

I found this slide in a box full of pictures from San Francisco’s Mission District that I had bought on eBay, but it clearly does not belong there… it’s in a very unusual aspect ratio, taken on 35mm black and white slide film. I assume it’s from the 1930s or maybe even 20s and was probably taken on Hawaii.

I love the spooky atmosphere of this shot. What are we looking at? The houses in the background? The canoe? The man? It’s a masterful composition and I wish I had more slides from this photographer.

The Weissenborn Visit

Posted in Culture, PhotoBlog: Forgotten Slides at 9:52 pm by thomas

Hermann Weissenborn spent the early 20th century making some very excellent hollow neck guitars and Hawaiian ukuleles in his workshop in Los Angeles after emigrating from Germany to New York in 1902, and he would have probably been astonished to know that almost a hundred years later collectors would pay a premium for his Hawaiian style guitars.

I know this because I googled his name last night, after stumbling over a solitary, unique slide in a collection of architectural photos of the Bay Area.

The slide is labeled in neat, very small handwriting: “Mr. Hermann Weissenborn, his daughter Meta and Mr. Albert and grandsons Edwin and Robert and me Thelma. Visiting us at 311 East 25th Street New York from L.A. California.”

Now judging from the clothes these people wear, this looks like a shot taken before the Second World War, maybe around 1930. The guitar maker Mr Weissenborn died in 1936, so that would fit. And how many Hermann Weissenborns could there possibly have been in Los Angeles at that time?

So I was already convinced just from my first Google hits that this must be the same man, but then I found this: In some of his guitars, Hermann Weissenborn used a label with his photo. I found a very low-quality scan of the label on Weissenborn.es, and if you ask me, this is a younger picture of the same old gentleman above:

03.23.07

Family in a Box

Posted in PhotoBlog: Forgotten Slides at 1:07 am by thomas

After spending a lot of time on sites like Swapatorium, Ookpik’s Negativity and Square America, I thought it’s my turn to try my hand at the big eBay Slides Roulette… I went and freed a couple of boxes of slides from different traders and now the first little box arrived via the US Postal Service… and I got a family in a box!

There were some 250 slides in the box, all from the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Classic family shots like this one…

Check out mom’s glasses! This shot is from August 1969.

There are also many pictures of trips across the country. To Washington DC, to Yosemite, to San Francisco… Here’s a picture of mom taking a picture of dad up in the Marin Headlands with the foggy Golden Gate Bridge in the background…

…and many other family moments that should be unforgettable. Like that trip to Japan in 1965, which must have been quite a special trip for that time, or the golfing trips to Hawaii. Or the time mom and dad rented that Mustang and drove across the Sierras.

Like with the cameras that contain never-developed film that I sometimes find on eBay, I can not fully comprehend how these boxes filled with family moments end up on the market. Looking at the first picture, all the kids in this family should still be alive forty years later, and some of them should have their own nearly grown up children themselves.

It’s eerie to see these people and to know that they are somewhere out there. The pictures are haunting in their everyday quality… like with the found films, these could be shots from everybody’s family album, but we all hope that there is never a tragedy that scatters our own albums out into the world, to be bought and scanned by strangers.

Here’s one more shot that was intended to be kept:

It’s July 21st, 1969. Dad took this picture of his daughter next to the running TV to commemorate the day when the first man walked on the moon. You can barely make out Neil Armstrong in his bulky, white suit standing next to the ladder of the Lunar Module in the fuzzy picture on the TV.

I can pretty much hear her daddy’s voice: “You’ll remember this day for the rest of your life!”