Krystal Gloss Prints 3

 

Of the pictures in this small booklet, it's the second one in this column that interested me the most.  It looks like a river ferry.  The top photo looks like a man tending a field, which points to private land.  As usual, click on The Krystal Gloss Collection in labels to see other images from this small photo album. 

Our Chickens

 

A very faded real photo postcard.  A nice farm family posing next to their chicken coop.  

TLR

  

Believe it or not, I own the twin lens reflex camera seen in this photo.  It's packed away in a box in my closet so I'm not going to dig it out.  If memory serves, it takes 620 film which means I could run a roll of 120 through the camera if I ever wanted to see how well it works.  

200,000

Sometime during the wee hours of this morning, The New Found Photography went over 200,000 unique page views.  These three photographs started things off.  I found the original glass negatives at an antique store in Washington state.  The seller had picked up hundreds of negatives from an estate sale in Montana, and decided to sell them off individually.  By the time I found these, the collection had been pretty much picked over.  I think it's the  dream of every photo collector to find a secret cache of photos from an unknown, yet talented photographer.  Sadly, with this lot broken up, and sold off,  we'll never know what the complete archive had to offer.

Oh, and I hand printed them back when I was still working in a photo lab.

Farm Family

I have to point this out.  The two ladies on the right look fairly masculine.

Really Big Horses

Written on  the back, "Claude, Frank, Earl, Wilby."  Got to admit it, love the last name.  Anyway, don't know anything about horses, but I do know that there was an age when horses were working animals, pulling wagons and farm machinery.  So, Clydesdales, Percherons, or some other breed?  They all look the same to me.

Oink

The human tongue can detect four basic taste sensations. Sweet, sour, bitter and salty.  Umami, the savory sensation from meats is sometimes included on the list.  Among the basic food groups, only bacon appeals to all the basic taste sensations, and that's why people love it so much.  Other basic food groups include, peanut butter, Kentucky Fried Chicken, ice cream, peach cobbler, chocolate, and potato chips.  And that's why America has the healthiest people in the world!

There's a stamp on the back of the top photo.  "BARD'S DRUG STORE IS THE ONLY AGENCY FOR RICKEY'S QUALITY KODAK FINISHING.  PRINTS 3 CENTS EACH.  FREE  ENLARGEMENT WITH EACH ROLL."

Moo Two, Too Many Cattle

The third photo in the column looks like it could be a 4H auction.  For those unfamiliar with the 4H, it's a national youth group for farm kids.  I wasn't in the 4H, but I did grow up in a small, rural town, with lots of farm kids in our school.  One of the assignments most 4H kids had was to raise a cow or a pig and then sell them at auction.  I always wondered how they could do it.  New born calf or piglet, raised almost from birth.  There had to be some sort of emotional attachment, and it must have been hard to send that animal off to another owner, or even to slaughter.  That's part of the deal of being a farmer, they were raised to it, and I guess that's what got them through.

Fence Sitter

I'm more impressed that he got up there in bare feet.  It's real hard to date something like this.  The overalls, the hat, the wooden fence post and fence wire could be from the late nineteenth century to the mid fifties.  Quite a range.  Just going by the printing paper, I'm going to make a very uneducated guess that it's from the twenties to  thirties.

Winning the War Is Easy...

Winning the peace is hard.  No matter how tough the war is, if you don't win the peace it's all for naught.  Roosevelt, Truman, Marshall, and Eisenhower understood that, Bush Jr., not so much.  My guess, North Africa, around 1944.

Down On the Farm

Ah, for the good old days when horses were working animals rather than pets, and there were no corporate farms.  Written on the back, "Milford Iowa"  According to Milford's website, Milford is a city in the great lakes region of Iowa.  But, with a population of 2,998 as of the 2010 census, I think most of us would say small town instead.  It's impossible to say with any certainty when this photo was taken, but just for reference,  Milford's population in 1920 was 908, 1930, 1062, and 1940, 1202.  The Iowa great lakes are three glacial lakes, and the largest natural lakes in Iowa.  Spirit Lake, at 5,684 acres is the largest of the three.  West and East Okaboji are the other two.

At Fullerton

As I was scanning this photograph a question occurred to me.   It may be a stupid question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.  Did women shave their legs before the twentieth century?   It wasn't until the World War 1 era that women began wearing dresses that showed their legs, so who would have know?   And what would they have shaved with?   The safety razor wasn't invented until 1880.  (It's amazing what you can find on line.)  A straight razor isn't the easiest thing to master.  Most men either grew a beard or where shaved by a barber.  I had a beard for a few years while I was in college and never really liked it.  But if my only other choice involved  a straight razor, I suspect I would have gotten used to  whiskers.  I can't imagine running a straight razor the length of a leg without major blood loss.  And just think of a nicked femoral artery.  Ouch.  Anyway, just curious.

Written on the back, "Mae, Guy, Ruth, Mother at Fullerton."  Fullerton is a city in northern Orange County in California.  It was named for businessman George Fullerton who bought the land for his employer, The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad.   The city was incorporated in 1887.  This photo was probably taken in the 1920s.  Fullerton would have still been a major grower of oranges and other fruit, but by that time it had also become an oil boom town.  I'll have a barrel of crude with that orange slice.

Horse

Now here's a mystery.  Why would anyone make a postcard from this nag?  He's not a race horse.  No, this horse is a working horse, made obsolete by tractors and cheap fuel.  This one's a pretty old card, from back in the day when farmers worked their horses and didn't think of them as a family pet.  Maybe the owner of this animal had a soft spot and liked his livestock.  Maybe after his working life this horse was retired to the back pasture.  More likely, when this photo was taken, the farmer/owner was thinking of how much money he could get for old Jughead.  Take a look at this card and make an offer.  Jughead can still pull a plow, a wagon, and if that doesn't work, there's always the slaughterhouse.

50,000 + How It All Started

I just took a quick look at the stats page and noticed that, sometime in the past week or so, I went over 50,000 page views. I have no idea whether that's a big number for a blog like this or not, but when I started this I was lucky to get thirty or forty views a month, so it seems big to me. Anyway, to mark the 50,000 milestone, I thought I would do something I've never done before. I'm repeating myself. These seven images, all hand printed, by me, form the original glass negatives, are the very first photographs I posted on The New Found Photography.

I think it must be the dream of every collector of old photographs to walk into some out of the way junk shop and find a box of photos by an unknown photographer of real talent. I sometimes wonder, if circumstances had been a bit different, if this could have been my discovery. It was back in the good old days when I had a full time job, a decent income, and three weeks of paid vacation a year. I had just finished a backpacking trip in Montana, had cleaned up, packed the car, and was headed home to Los Angeles, when I made an impulse stop at an antique store, well more of a junk shop actually, and found these glass negatives. The owner of the place told me that he once had a crate of images, all from the same source. He thought that there must have been 500 or so, but he had broken up the collection. He had given some of them away, thrown some out, (Not because they were damaged or not very good, but because they were taking up too much space.) and had been selling the rest for a couple of bucks a piece. He had about forty or so left, but for reasons I've never understood, thought credit cards were for suckers, and it was a cash only sale. I bought these seven, got his phone number, and after I got home called him up, and offered to send him a check for the rest, but he said, "Nah, it's too much work."

I wonder what those other negatives might have been like. And I also wonder who took them. Perhaps it was a local professional or maybe an amateur who had a primitive darkroom in the fruit cellar. When I look at the farm photograph, I don't see the mother of the family, so I sometimes speculate that the photographer was a woman. We will never know, and any chance of finding out has, I think, been destroyed by a road side vendor, who thought more highly of telephone poll insulators, old barbed wire, and 50 year old beer bottles than he did of a box of glass negatives, and the unknown photographer who recorded a small, intimate piece of Montana history.

Courcelles

Thought I'd take a break for a few days from the German-American photo album, but still stay in Europe. Stamped on the back of this one, "STUDIO R. TASSIN E033 COURCELLES" I went on line and found 32 communities in France either named Courcelles or with Courcelles in the name, one in Quebec, and one in Belgium. Only the one in Belgium is large enough to sustain a trolley system. This photo came from the mystery grab bag of photos that I've already dipped into for several posts. (It looks like there are a number of images from Europe in the lot.) Click on the image to bring it up in a larger window to see the old Volkswagen and trolley car waiting for the parade to pass by.