On the Flip Side 1

I've written about this before, but what the hell, let's repeat.  I hate it when antique dealers break-up collections and cut up photo albums for fun and profit.  Any snapshot, any album has context.  I love looking at all the old photos I've purchased, over the years, but I'd enjoy it even more if I could see the whole life of the people in the images.  Seeing snapshots, thumbing through albums, form beginning to end.

 Too, every collector of old photographs dreams of finding the complete work of a great, but unknown, photographer.  It happens.  Vivian Maier spent forty plus years as a nanny, taking pictures in her spare time.  After her death, thousands of negatives and prints were purchased at a storage locker auction.  Fortunately, the buyer understood what he had found, and didn't sell off one print or one strip of film, at a time.

 Many years ago, on a vacation, I found some great glass negatives being sold at an antique store in Montana.  The owner had bought crates of them at an auction, and broke up the collection.  (Go to my very post and look at the few I was able to buy.)  I can still remember how excited I was when I looked at the few that were left, and how disappointed I was when I was told those few were all that were left.  The man had broken apart a collection of what could have been the work of a significant artist.  Alas, we'll never know.

Anyway, it was the top image of this post that I wanted.  It was cut out of an album, and the second photo was pasted on the backside.

3 Girls

There has to be some meaning to this pose.  The dresses and hair bows don't look like everyday wear to my not particularly well informed eye.  Maybe it's the prize petunias they're trying to highlight, or some weird, town celebration.

The Gothic Horror Hair Bow

I don't know about anyone else, but I associate that hair bow with twelve year old girls, not adult women.  That alone makes this image kind of odd, throw in the leafless trees and shadows, and it all seems rather creepy.  I don't know why, but it reminds me of Nosferatu.  The silent version directed by F.W. Murnau, not the surprisingly good Werner Herzog remake.

Stamped on the back, "H. POGADE, NEUKOLLN 50"  Neukollon, with two dots above the "O" is a neighborhood in Berlin.  It took a bit of web surfing, but I was able to find a reference to a Pogade Camera Store, in Berlin,  that dates back to, at least, the mid thirties.  There's a watermark on the back, "Agfa Lupex" that wasn't used before the mid forties, so 50 might be a year.