Japanese Ladies

Some of you may be familiar with my Fair Use blog.  Over my many years of collecting old photographs, I've also ended up with more than a few non photographic bits of ephemera.  I had wanted to post them somewhere, but there weren't really enough examples to justify a separate blog.  As it so happens, I had also down loaded a fairly large number of images, from the internet, that I found fascinating.  In the end, I solved the growing problem of having too many things stored on my hard drive, and the whole what to do with the non photographic stuff by combining them on www.fairuse-wjy.blogspot.com.

This afternoon, I ran across a collection of paintings and one drawing by Estelle Peck Ishigo.  Since I made the decision that I didn't want to spend a lot of time typing up biographical information on the artists and photographers posted to Fair Use, and since I have this photo that is somewhat related, I'll do it here.

Estelle Peck was born in 1899 in Oakland, California.  Her mother, Bertha Apfels was an opera singer.  I wasn't able to find much about her, other than that she may have been German born, and that her career was limited, mostly, to the California stage.  Estelle's father was Bradford Peck, a portrait and landscape painter.  He wasn't a major American artist, but his work occasionally comes up for auction, and he is collected.  He was born in 1845 in New York and died in Los Angeles in 1921.  As a child, Estelle showed promise in both music and art.  She went to the Otis Art Institute.  In 1929, she met Arthur Shigeharu Ishigo, and aspiring actor who had a job at Paramount.  In 1929, inter racial marriage was illegal in California, so the young couple eloped to Mexico.  According to Wikipedia, she was disowned by her family.  After Pearl Harbor, her husband was arrested for no other crime than being of Japanese ancestry, and even though Estelle was exempt from being interred, she chose to accompany Arthur to the Heart Mountain Relocation  Camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming.  While there, she made paintings and drawing of her life at the camp.  After the war, she and Arthur returned to Los Angeles, where they worked for a fish canary.  Arthur died in 1957.  In 1972, Estelle published a book of her drawings.  She died in poverty, in 1990, just months before a documentary about her life and art was released.  Days of Waiting won the 1991 Academy Award for best documentary short subject.

Anyway, because the one woman in this snapshot appears to be wearing a kimono, I'm fairly certain they are Japanese.  Because I found it at an antique store in Los Angeles, I'd bet that it was taken in the United States.  If I'm right about all that, then it's almost certain these four ladies were sent to a relocation camp, and it's possible that they may have ended up at Heart Mountain, and if so, they probably met Estelle Peck Ishigo.

The Last Fair Use Alert

This is it. The last time I'll post about Fair Use, www.fairuse-wjy.blogspot.com, my new blog where I publish non photographic images from my collection as well as things of interest I've found on line. After this, people will have to find it on there own.

Once again, I've put up three images, my self imposed weekly limit. A bookplate by German artist Michel Fingesten. He's not very well know, but in my opinion, worth a look. A book by Richard Halliburton, once a best selling author of travel books, now almost out of print. And finally a still from a German silent movie starring Marlene Dietrich. When I was in high school our library had an encyclopedia that listed T.S. Elliot, born in the United States but a naturalised British citizen as a British author. The same encyclopedia listed W. H. Auden, born in England but a naturalised American as a British author. I always wondered about that. Anyway, Dietrich became an American citizen in 1939, so that's how I identified her.

Fair Use Alert

This week's Fair Use http://www.fairuse-wjy.blogspot.com/ posts are up. A portrait of actress and show girl Olive Thomas. Commissioned by producer Flo Ziegfeld after her death in 1920, it shows Olive as he remembered her. Olive Thomas was born into poverty in Charleroi, PA, she ended up in New York as one of Ziegfeld's show girls, and possibly a mistress as well. Eventually she moved on to Hollywood, became quite successful in silent movies and then died young of an accidental poisoning. Also Tenzing Norgay on Mt. Everest, one of the first two men to summit. Edmund Hillary has always been given credit as the first man on top, but both Hillary and Tenzing always said that they did it together and declined to name the actual first. And finally a bit of mid (20th) century modernist architecture. The promise of which, high quality homes made form prefabricated parts, sold for affordable prices, was never realized.

Fair Use Notice

This week's posts for Fair Use, http://www.fairuse-wjy.blogspot.com/, my new blog of non photographic bits and pieces form my collection as well as things I've found online that I find fascinating, are up and ready to view. There is a photograph of white,emancipated slaves. For those who don't get the significance of that, I'd suggest reading Puddin' Head Wilson by Mark Twain. A depression era painting from Los Angles, and my first repeat, a second painting form German artist, Max Beckmann. Click on his name in the labels section, and they can be seen together.

Fair Use

I'm only going to put up notices about www.fairuse-wjy.blogspot.com until the end of the year. After that, you're on your own. This weeks posts include a bit of classic American industrial design (A camera, no surprise there.), a fashion photo from the 1950s and a novelty postcard from my own collection.