Random thoughts from the Pacific Rim
It’s 9am on a Saturday morning and I just sat down for a relaxed breakfast and I’m hearing the birds sing in our backyard. It’s the first time this year to hear the clear, joyful sounds of the migratory birds coming back from the south.
It’s Spring.
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?”
Shorpy.com is a photo blog that features some of the best scans of early photographs from the 1900s to the 1940s. Many of the early black and white photos are very dramatic and many feature scenes of the daily lives of child laborers in coal mines and factories.
And then there are some amazing color photographs from the early 1940s that bring the history to life like nothing else. Just check out “N and Union: 1942” for a taste of the quality of the photos on this site. I could spend hours looking at these pictures – while historical black-and-white shots are always interesting and often beautiful, they do seem remote. But the color photos make you see the world through the eyes of the people who are there… Suddenly the colorful advertisements come to life, and the people in the photos become real human beings, not just lifeless statues.
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.
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:
It doesn’t happen often that I’m getting hooked on some Flash game on a website, but if it happens, it’s usually pretty bad. This weekend I had to put my plans for world domination on hold to spend insane amounts of time on this game: Desktop Tower Defense
This game is just the right mix of strategy and puzzle game to keep me playing forever. Pure genius.
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!”
Ever heard of the Antarctic Snow Cruiser?
Thought so… The Snow Cruiser is a one-of-a-kind vehicle that was developed in the 1930s to help conquer the Antarctic continent. It featured built in bunk beds for four and a galley and was one big piece of machinery. Oh – it also had a roof rack to hold an airplane.
There is some film material that shows the beast in action, rolling towards the US East Coast before being shipped out to the icy south, and it looks pretty big compared to the cars around it.
Sadly enough, it never performed very well in the snow and ice, due to the massive weight pushing the tires too deep into the snow – and the treadless (!) tires being too slippery on ice. I’m not sure how they could miss that last point during development, since ice must have been on their minds at some point.
Nevertheless, it was one beautiful machine. I especially like the art-deco chrome trim around the sides of the machine. Very stylish, and sadly a forgotten art in our modern times.
As a side note, it seems that the Snow Cruiser was finally abandoned in the ice where it was re-discovered in the late 1950s, before floating out into the ocean sometime in the 1960s where it now rests with the fishes.
For some reason there is always an intense fascination with the future of transportation. Every few months we find articles in magazines and newspapers about the car (plane, boat, subway…) of the future, and invariably these predictions are wildly – and often hilariously – wrong.
We’ve all seen the tear-shaped cars of the future as imagined in the 1950s, or the spiky rocket ships of the future as imagined in the 1960s… and then there is of course the forever-in-the-future flying car, coming to a garage near you in less than 20 years for at least three generations now.
Here is a site of the University of California in Berkeley that has a fine collection of futuristic photos and drawings of cars, planes and trains that will forever stay in our future.
(Thanks to Jürgen for the link)
Here’s a fun little quiz:
Name all the countries in the world in ten minutes!
There’s 192 countries that are currently officially recognized, and this little quiz almost drove me crazy. I thought that I would easily be able to spell out half the countries in ten minutes, but I had 127 countries left at the end of my first try.
Time to study some geography. Again.
