Ptak Science Books

The First Published Image of a Photograph, April 20, 1839

JF Ptak Science Books,  Post 1701 

The first published photographic image,  or "sunpicture", illustrating an excellent collection of extremely early papers on photography, 1839.

Bird, Golding.  "A Treatise on Photogenic Drawing."  Five papers in a series found and bound in the London-published journal, The Mirror.  These five issues comprise a very early work on the new science of photography by Dr. Golding Bird, appearing in issues from April 20-May 25, 1839:  this includes "A treatise on photogenic drawing",  (pp. 241-44);  and also  "The new art - photography",  (pp. 261-2, 281-3, 317-18, 333-335.)

It is page 241 (issue no. 945, Saturday April 20) that particularly peaked my interest--it contains the First Image of a Photogenic Drawing. This is essentially the first publication of an image produced by any sort of photographic process.  The process here is the 'sun picture", a photographic process, making this the first published "photographic" image, but really it is more like the first publication of a photographic image that was produced via woodcut.  It predates the first mass-published photograph by four years and the first (entirely) photographically illustrated book (The Pencil of Nature) by six years.  The sun picture, or heliotype, was first described in print in 1801 by both Thomas Wedgewood and Humphrey Davy, and although the process was at least 39 years old at this time there are no recorded *published* images produced by that process. (The woodcut is much larger than usual for The Mirror, and is also of a unique brown/red color, and of a different hue than any other woodcut that we have seen in any of the issues of the first 45 years of this publication.)

The image is described in David A. Hanson Collection of the History of Photomechanical Reproduction, located in
 the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, Massachusetts), so:

"...facsimile of a photogenic drawing of ferns (done on the block) as a plate [to illustrate an article serialized by Dr. Golding Bird "A Treatise on Photogenic Drawing" and reprinted in the Magazine of Natural History, p. 234-44]...printed in rust to imitate the photogenic drawing... The facsimile of the photogenic drawing done directly from an exposure on the block is the first photographic image published. The finished example is printed directly from the block in a reddish brown to match the color of Talbot's first salt print photograms."--Hanson Collection catalog, p. 6 [Source, here.]

Under the title, "the First Reproduction of a Photograph",the George Eastman House of Photography's journal, the Image (volume 11/2, 1962)  notes:

"On April 20, 1839, the London magazine The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, featured as its cover a "Facsimile of a Photogenic Drawing." There is a copy in the George Eastman House collection. It is a picture —in negative—of three stalks of leaves. The original was made by Golding Bird, "a distinguished botanist" by following William Henry Fox Talbot's newly invented process, the details of which were made public at the Royal Society on February 21. Paper was made light sensitive by bathing it first in sodium chloride solution, then, after sponging the surface, in a solution of silver nitrate. The material could be used in two ways: to make, as Golding Bird did, a contact print, pressing flat objects to the surface during exposure to light, or in a camera. Both techniques produced negative images, which were fixed in a strong solution of sodium chloride. Talbot named his invention "photogenic drawing." His friend, Sir John Herschel, proposed for it the word "photography."

"Thus to The Mirror falls the honor of having first published a reproduction of a photograph. The facsimile which was presented to its readers was the work of a draftsman, who made a drawing of the photograph, and a wood engraver, who cut the block..”

The Image continues:

"Only a week later, on April 27, The Magazine of Science and School of Arts, another London magazine, featured three "Fac-similes of Photogenic Drawings" on its cover: two botanical specimens; (Fool's Parsley and Grass of Parnassus), and a piece of lace. Although wood engravings created by skill of hand, they approach photography more closely. For the very wooden block used for the printing plate was itself sensitized, just as Bird's paper had been sensitized, and the engraver followed with his burin the photographic image itself, rather than the artist's drawing."

"The photogenic drawings were contributed to the magazine by a reader who signed himself "G.F." He commented, in his covering letter published in the same issue: "I send you three drawings of this new art, which were impressed at once on box-wood, and therefore are fit for the graver, without any other preparation. I flatter myself that this process may be useful to carvers and wood engravers, not only to those who cut the fine objects of artistical design, but still more to those who cut patterns and blocks for lace, muslin, calico-printing, paper-hanging, &c., as by this simple means the errors, expense, and time of the draughtsman may be wholly saved, and in a minute or two the most elaborate picture or design, or the most complicated machinery, be delineated with the utmost truth and clearness."

Gernsheim states in his History of Photography that  the first photographic camera ever made for sale to the public was advertised by Francis West, an optician of 83 Fleet Street, London, and published in this issue.   

Bird later reworked these sections of the Mirror into elements of and a chapter in his Elements of Natural Philosophy; (being an experimental introduction to the study of the physical sciences; revised and enlarged third London edition, Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1848). This article was reproduced in the Journal of the Franklin Institute in September 1839 as "Observations on the Application of Heliographic or Photogenic Drawing to Botanical Purposes; with an account of an economic mode of preparing the Paper: "in a Letter to the Editor of the magazine of Natural History".

[Offered for sale in our books for sale section, here.]

A Note on Tricycles in the History of Nothing

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1576

This image--from the Scientific American Supplement for 25 September 1895--triggered an immediate reaction, though not for the electrification of what looks like a child's toy. Charles H. Barrows of Willimantic, Connecticut patented this bike, which turns out to be a considerable object--it has a two hp engine which is powered by a hundred-pound battery that is "stored in the two cabinets" (measuring 24x8x8) on either side of the hub, making the wheel I guess somewhere around 34-36" in diameter. After everything was said and done, the trike was a big, heavy, thing, in spite of a fairly spartan design in the rest of the bike.

What the woodcut remind me of was William Eggleston's quiet, odd, iconic and enigmatic portrait of a tricycle, which  I think launched a new photographic experience for the suburbs--a kind of Robert Frank for people doing "okay".

Eggleston's work, including this s image above (Untitled, Tricycle and Memphis, 1970), was a subject at a MoMA show in 1976, William Eggleston's Guide.  It was received with long glances down long noses--seen as a banal exercise in the portrayal of everyday stuff in everyday settings, critics saw the semi-nothingness in the photos as simple all-nothingness, with one critic asking "a guide to what?"  But the Eggleston show was far more than that, showing the bits--in color--of American cultural life in middle class seclusion, a splendor of small Americana. 

Bill Owens, working at about the same time as Eggleston, also shared his vision on the restricted glory of the suburbs in his Suburbia, spreading his discoveries of new-found cultural diversity.

The critics saw basically nothing in these works when they were first shown, though they had a lot more going on for them than the electrified tricycle, which was far too big and heavy to have done any good for anyone (though the design of the sprocket/wheel was pretty interesting).  The only nothingness that are in the photos of Eggleston and Ownes was the nothing that the critics chose to see.  Sometimes new, different ways of looking at things as in the cases of these two photogrpaher makes it seem as though it is a newness of nothing, but only for a short time, until everybody else showed up. 

Ancient Motion Pictures, London, 1896/1903

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1413

I just wanted to share these films that I found at the British Film Institute's youtube account.  They are remarkable, clear, fluid images of London in 1903/1913 or thereabouts, offering a slice of relatively unrehearsed life from 100 years ago that is so unexpected. They are visual time capsules, beautifully restored by the BFI--they are like moving picture versions of sumptuous platinum prints, with gorgeous detail in each frame, so lovely that they look as though they could withstand micro inspection. 

The first: London, 1903:

 

Blackfriar's Bridge, 1896--very short, but again, another remarkable piece of moving history...if only there was sound.

Trafalgar Square Riot for Mrs. Pankhurst, 1913:

Petticoat Lane, a semi-ancient marketplace east of Central London, showing a common look to common folk buying and selling common stuff, 1903:

Picturing the Unseen World #`1--the Discovery of the Complex World of Splashes, 1877.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1350

 
A.M. Worthington published his extraordinary researches in capturing drops and splashes  just a year after the invention of the telephone--seeing his very quietly magnificent work would've been worth the phone call, even at those heady rates at the beginning of the new medium. Worthington was the first in his field, and for a short while, before he told anyone, he was the only person on the planet who had ever seen the fantastic complexity of this very common and previously-simple event.   In its own way these photographs showing the deformation of a drop of milk (and mercury) were as much a revolution as the images shown by Robert Hooke in his epochal Micrographia in which he (just about the next-best-thing to Newton) introduced the fabulous complexities of the previously microscopical world(s). 

Worthington and Hooke are two in a long line of people who brought  unseen worlds into the visible sphere.  Isaac Newton's (1642-1727) reflecting telescope (1672) gave a brighter vision to the observable universe; Galileo Galilei created an observable universe an order of magnitude larger than ahead ever been seen before in just one action, in one evening.  Christoph Scheiner put a face on the sun in 1611, Henry Mosely gave geometrical growth patterns to the nautilus shell in 1838, James Fraunhoefer found out the chemical constituents of the sun in 1814, Watson/Crick (and Rosalind Franklin, really) emerged the helix of DNA in 1953, Wilhelm Roentgen presented pictures of the internal structure of living humans without a single drop of blood in 1895,  and on and on, all providing us with spectacular images of what these people saw.

Chladni's images of the vibrations made from a bow on a violin string caught on sand-topped metal plates:

Adding mercury to mercury: the sensational drawings by the Weber brothers as they observed the changing wave frontsmade by a drop of mercury into a pool of mercury:

 

Worthington's visions into the small, oblique world of ephemeral occurrences gave these things a wider world to themselves; seeing their structure, their complexities, and getting the viewer into their tiny worlds made everyone who could think about such things a better person for doing so.

The series of semi-photographic images that Worthington was able to make of the drops and splashes could not be readily reproduced in his short article ("On Drops") published in the Scientific American  (25 August 1877, and available for purchase at our blog bookstore) at this time--the half-tone was still a few years away, and the only way outside of making a drawing after the photograph in 1877 would've been a process (like, say, the Woodburytype) that would have been much too expensive to use in a mass-market publication like SciAm. Also, the photographic plates in 1876/7 weren't quite up to the task of fixing an image exposed so quickly.  Even when Worthington's book is published on this subject--a popular effort in 1895--it reproduces the photographs as halftones but there are still many interpretative drawings of those images. (The belief in the Civil War images reproduced as woodcuts in places like Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's was very high--it was enough to know the woodcut was being executed after a photograph and not from drawings made on the spot by the magazines' field artists.)

This was some pretty sophisticated stuff, being able to freeze the action of a drop of milk as it exploded in slow stages on a flat surface--especially, again, when you consider that photography wasn't yet 40 years old and was really only a half-decade or so into its first major revolution since the early 1850's. 

Perhaps though the most spectacular thing of all about seeing this dedicated series of images of an exploding drop of milk was that you could look at the series and imagine it all taking place in reverse . 

The drawings and photos below are taken from his 1895 work, The Splash of a Drop:

Manipulated Art 2--Panoramic Brooklyn Bridge, Boxing Scene and such on Accounting Paper, 1880

JF Ptak Science Books

Continuing a series of small experiments I've printed some classic panoramic images on some rather beautiful tabulating paper, taken from an 1880's ledger. All are available from our blog bookstore.

And the detail:

Boxing scene with mamoth crowd, ca. 1910.

And the detail:

Police officers, ca. 1900:

And the detail:

Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1920:

And the detail:

Andthe New York City skyline, ca. 1905:

And the detail:

The negative Brooklyn Bridge:

And the detail:

 

First Photograph of a Smell, Revisited

JF Ptak Science Books

It leaves me with such a cozy feeling to not find what I think is an obvious-but-odd phrase in Google.

 And that's what happened with "the first photograph of a smell" (or "photograph of a smell" or odor, for that matter),  as shocking to the senses as it might be.

There are long and interesting lists of firsts in photography: the first color photograph (Maxwell, 1867, but impermanent), the first photograph of a human face, the first photograph of the moon, the first photo of a planet, and so on, tirelessly, until we see how many derivations of "firsts" there are. (We can go from first photo of human to first photo of a human face to first photo of a human in motion to the first photo showing human hands to the old human recorded by photography tot eh first photo of a couple to the first photo of a human with a tool and on and on.) There is a shorter list of "first photographic non-photograph of a photograph" (?!) that I wrote about in an earlier (illustrated) post, but we won't go there today.

Here is a "first" though that I think hasn't been dealt with too terribly much: the first photograph of an odor.

These beautiful images appeared in the 10 September 1938 issue of The Illustrated London News and were exhibited at the 83rd Annual International Exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society, and were made by H. Devaux (who evidently, according to the snippet of an obituary that I can see from Science magazine, was a plant physiologist and "pioneer of surface physics"
who died in 1956). The note accompanying the photographs read: "The emission of an odor involves volatillisation of material. If an odiferous material is enclosed in a cell a few millimeters above a clean mercury surface, it is possible to collect on the surface of the mercury a monomolecular layer of the volatillising or odoriferous substance. If the mercury surface initially is covered with talc powder, the gradual formation of the monomolecules layer may be observed as the talc is gradually pushed away from the point immediately below the specimen of material."

The photos are that of the odors of a lily and of camphor. I don't know which is which, and a good story could be made up for either photo belonging to either item. Needless to say, these images are as gorgeous as they are unexpected, especially considering that they were made in 1938.

{Both images are avaialble for purchase from our blog bookstore.]

FOOTNOTE:

I'd just like to add here the first photograph of a human being--well, actually, it is the first photograph that just happens to capture a human in the emulsion (discussed very nicely on the Doug's Darkworld  blogsite.  Since the  exposure time was so terribly long for this image to be made, the moving people and horses and carriages on the street, all of the city-life bits, were necessarily spectral, invisible, to the photograph.  Only the stationary items were captured, and the only people captured here were two figures in the foreground, doing something or other that made them still for at least five minutes--long enough for their anonymous but famous photonic impressions to be captured.   Mr. Doug and others seem to think this is a man getting his boots shined--I agree.

Mr. Mole, the Stationary Busby Berkeley of Mass Crowd Installation Photographs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1185

I've long enjoyed these massively organized, captured moments of time and effort--large caliber photos of concentrated efforts of tens of thousands of people, all of their motion and utility directed to produce this one moment in time.  Perhaps the greatest practioner of this artform was Arthur S. Mole (1889-1983), the stationary Busby Berkeley of Big Organized Crowd Efforts (BOCE).  (He led an interesting life, coming from Scotland with his family to be part of a Utopian community led by John Alexander Dowie--a faith healing visionary, self-reported precursor to the second coming of Christ, and leader of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church--at City Zion, Illinois. Dowie was a problematic man not without good and interesting qualities, though his to-the-death prayer duel with a rival visionary is an interesting story to be left for another time.)

I've always enjoyed this photograph  in particular--it was made from a 70'-tall platform with a 11x14" view camera using a wide angle and a deep oblique angle, along with 30,000 soldiers from Camp Custer, Michigan.   It was made in 1918 by Mole, along with the evident and very capable choreography of John D. Thomas, who was the Doctor of Persepctive and Motion for the pictures.

[Note: most of the images below are extremely clickable/zoomable.]

Most of the soldiers are used to make the field at the top of the stripes--so near as I can tell (from the resolution image that I had to work with), there are about 300 men in each stripe (except for the outer two), meaning that there between 3,000 to 5,000 in the collected stripes, which puts something like 25,000 troops in the stars and their field. The middle stripe I reckon to be 150' long; my guesstimate for the star field is 600' deep and 1250' wide, making a triangular collection of men 750'x1250'. That takes a little bit of planning to accomplish to ensure that everything is kept in perspective, and which also means that a lot more folks are needed at the top of the constructed image than at the bottom.

Another excellent example is this photo made of the U.S. Marine Corps emblem using 6,000 marines at Paris Island in 1920.

Gliders, Flight & Photography in the 1850's & 1860's

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1075

The field of "photographic firsts" has always been interesting to me--the first photograph of the Moon, the first of a person the first portrait, the first color photo, the first engraving of a photographic image, and so on--and so I came to wonder about the first photograph of an airplane, or aircraft.  What I found was this monster, built by Jean-Marie le Bris, evidently the first image ever made via photography of a fixed-wing aircraft:

The photograph (made in 1857, 18 years after the invention of photography) looks very reworked and strains the imagination some, but it shows the glider of Jean-Marie le Bris, who actually achieved gliding flight in the aircraft.  I am sure that the glider used those enormous wheels for land transportation and were not an integral part of the craft. 

It was in that same year that Felix du Temple and his brother constructed and flew a small, steam-powered monoplane aircraft model (schematics above), which looked like a bird from the plan perspective and a beetle from the elevation.  The view of the model head-on seems remarkable to me, showing very little in the way of profile.  

Ferdinand d'Esterno produced a lovely design of a possible aircraft in his 1867 pamphlet, Du Vol de Oiseaux ("Onthe Flight of Birds") , a glider that looked manageable and full of possibility, all based on his relentless study of the flight of birds.  Esterno reasoned that all of the heavier birds excelled in soaring flight, and since this was the case, there was hope for man to fly as well. 

Esterno's glider was interestingly outfitted with a movable seat for the pilot--something that would be able to change the center of gravity, the flier's chair connected to the very broad tail section--controlling a rather elegant, rather light-for-its-era (330 pounds) craft with 215 square feet of wing surface.  (See Flymachines.org for a nice description of this and other early aircraft.)  I think what I like most about the Esterno machine--an idea that never progressed beyond the drawing stage--is its compactness and lovely lines, especially as we can see in the cross-section below:

As the author(s) of Flymachine.org and other sites and books have pointed out, though Esterno's plans never got out beyond the pages of his pamphlet, he did have an influence on other later fliers, most notably Gustave Whitehead (1874-1927) and the Wright Brothers.  It was whitehead's work which from my perspective most closely resembles Esterno's as we can see below in this ca. 1901 photograph, the greatest difference of course being the two engine-driven propellers.

But it was Otto Lilienthal who was one of the most important figures in the development of flight in the nineteenth century, making the first heavier than air gliding flights in what looked quite a bit like bird wings.  (Wilbur Wright said of him; “Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted" as found in  The Aero Club of America Bulletin, September 1912, and also in the article on Lilenthal in Wiki.)   )  He would die in 1896 in a gliding accident, falling to a crumpled death.  We see him in a more successful moment in this fantastic photo:

Lilienthal also influenced the English aviator Percy Pilcher (1866-1899) whose four interesting gliders ( named theBat, the Beetle, the Gull, and the Hawk) led to his engine powered glider--a design left not completed due to Pilcher's own fatal gliding accident in 1899.

But getting back to photographic "firsts" and aviation, the earliest surviving aerial photograph was made by James Wallace Black (1825–1896) whose tethered balloon image of Boston (below) is a splendid 160-year-old image of the city; the first first in this category actually belongs to Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (more popularly known as "Nadar") but that work hasn't survived.

Picture Posts--American Photo Series

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Picture Posts

A few images that I've put aside in the America series:  general picture dump. Sorry, but I didn't have any notes with them...

 

Sports Photos, 1890-1940, Mostly Women (Picture Dump)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC
Here's a few interesting images I've collected and just want to make a picture post of them.

 

Window Shopping with Berenice Abbott, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 883  Blog Bookstore

I enjoy antiquarian window shopping, browsing photos or engravings that depict goods for sale-- especially if the prices are posted. I came back to this deep-in-the-Depression-fantastic photo made in 1935 by Berenice Abbott (Springfield, Ohio, 1898-1991). Blossom Restaurant, NYC was part of Abbott’s effort funded by the WPA, this time as a part of her Changing New York Project, and captures the restaurant and neighboring barber shop at 103 Bowery.  The two businesses actually occupied the first floors and basement (respectively) of the Boston Hotel, a standard flop house in a tough and distressed part of the city that rented beds by the day, with 249 small door-less cubicles offering a decent place to spend the night for 30 cents¹. 

30 cents seems to be the going rate for a bunch of things going on in this  picture—30 cents for a night in the hotel, 30 cents for the better offers of Morris Gordon’s restaurant. 30 cents for a haircut and shave, 30 cents for a “women’s hair bob”² and so on.  Which seems about right—a fancy haircut and a decent better-than-average dinner for two will probably cost about the same, today. 

If you were really on a tight budget, 30 cents would buy you three vegetarian dinners, or 6 offerings of bread and soup, or three visits to the table of meatballs and bans, or pigs feet and kraut. 

The price of a stick-to-your-ribs meal of sirloin and potatoes and a pot of coffee also cost about the same as a gallon and a half of gasoline (which cost about 20 cents).  The same amount of gas today would get you a serving at McDonalds, or something on that order, and perhaps even a happy take-away for the kids. Perhaps the two even out. 

30 cents might get you a loaf of bread, and wouldn’t quite get you a dozen eggs.  Now this is remarkable, because if you adjust all of this according to modest CPI measures, the average cost of a dozen eggs in 1935 was 37 cents, or (according to the US Census website generating 1935 to 2009 prices adjusting to CPI) $5.84.  The bread would cost $4.74 in 2009 dollars, which means that the staples today—milk, bread, butter, eggs, were more expensive in 1935 than today.  Ditto gasoline, which cost 19 cents a gallon, or $3 today—actually this would be much more expensive in 1935 as the mileage the cars were getting then (and the octane) was much lower, so the cost of running an automobile was considerably higher.   The cost of the car itself, though, still favors the ‘thirties for modest transportation, which came in at about 600 dollars, or just over $9000 in 2009 dollars³. 

The 3-cent first class postage stamp of 1935 was more expensive than first class postage in 2009:  47 cents versus 44.  When you look at the increases and bitty spikes of the cost of a first class stamp over time the whole thing looks pretty flat. 

The average salary for a family of four in 1935 was about 1500/year, which oddly enough is about the same for the poverty guideline level for 2009 established by the Department of Health and Human Services (about $23,000).  Minimum wage legislation didn’t begin until 1938, but if you take a look at one of my earlier posts here on the history of this idea  you’ll see that the recent history of legislating  a meaningful level of acceptance for a base living wage is mainly disgraceful, with relatively little accomplished (in adjusted economic terms) for half a century.  (The new minimum wage brings us to about a mid-way point as the highest minimum wages paid in the 71-year history of the program.)

And so I thank Ms Abbott again for her beautiful social commentary, and a happy 75^th birthday to this photograph. 

Notes

1.A fantastic website and resource for changing aspects of NYC can be found here, at Frank Levere’s Changing New York site. http://www.newyorkchanging.com/

2. I wrote a little bit about the appearance of women-only hair salons in my post “The Staggering Beauty of Barber Shops” http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/02/the-staggering-beauty-of-barber-shops-naive-surreal-department-22.html

 

3. Other bits of what stuff cost in 1935:

Flour (5 lbs)     25.3 cents

Bread (lb)         8.3

Round steak (lb)  36.0

Bacon (lb)        41.3

Butter (lb)       36.0

Eggs (doz.) 37.6

Milk (1/2 gal.)   23.4

Oranges (doz.)    22.0

Potatoes (10 lbs) 19.1

Coffee (lb)       25.7

Sugar (5 lbs)     28.2

Car: $580

Gasoline: 19 cents/gal

House: $6,300

Bread: 8 cents/loaf

Milk: 47 cents/gal

Postage Stamp: 3 cents

Vermeer of the Tars: Found Art in Photographs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 842 

In England, women were welcomed to the (paid) workforce during the years of the First World War (1914-1918)—their employment in traditionally male positions enabled those they replaced to go out to the front and die for their country.  Thus the women seen here in the News Photo Service Agency photograph (taken in 1918), working at spraying tar in the streets of London, were appreciated, and tolerated.  For women in England the War blasted away the contrivances of formally scheduled employment:  something like 12% of fall women in England were working as servants and house cleaners.   Come the War, women were offered jobs of revolutionary stature in a wide range and variety of work.  The Civil Service employment for women went from 33,000 in 1911 to 102,000 in 1921, and trade union membership rose 160% (357,000 in 1914 to 1,000,000 in 1918 (with men showing a 44% increase at the same time); for the most part, though, employers took advantage of the situation, and the women still generally earned less than half of the salary as comparable male workers did (or the men they replaced). 

When the end of the War came, so did the appreciation for the women replacement workers—there was bitter feelings in the post-war period because of the weak British economy and a scarcity of jobs.  So the women who took the jobs of men to help the country’s war effort and free up hundreds of thousands of men for war service became an atavistic action, “taking” the jobs of men who had gone out to fight for their country. This of course cost many women their jobs, but the damage had already been deeply done to the pre-1914 British world of the sexual politics of business-being-done, though it would take World War II to really ingrain the appearance of women in the workforce into the national psyche.

I've liked this photo for a long time, seeing things differently in it over the years.  It struck me just yesterday that the woman in foreground-right--whose close-up reminds me too of a Madonna, a Mona Lisa of the Tars--looks like a Vermeer character from 400 years ago.  Or at least the position of her body does.

 

The Best Dollar the Government Ever Spent? The Migrant Mother, 1936

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 837  Blog Bookstore 

On of the great innovations in a sea of great things accomplished during the Franklin Roosevelt administrations was the formation of the Farm Security Administration, a division of the government established to help farmers through the devastating Dust Bowl and Great Depression.  A subset of the FSA was a photographic unit which was set up to document the progress made by the FSA (and provide, I am sure, for some much-needed good news, a hearts-and-minds campaign).  This division was headed by Roy Emerson Stryker, who wound up hiring a collection of dream-team photographers unlike any ever assembled for a single purpose.  Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins, Mary Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Gordon Parks, Charlotte Brooks, John Vachon, Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn were sent out all across the country and wound up with the greatest and most beautiful photographic history ever assembled.  There were about 77,000 images made, and I recall reading (somewhere) that the total budget for the Stryker group for the years 1936-19421 was about $100,000, meaning that each completed image cost just over a dollar apiece.  

One of the most compelling of all of these images was from a series made by the new-hire Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)  in 1936.  On the tail end of a month-long road trip she was nearing the end of her day when she spotted a hand-lettered sign reading “Pea-Pickers Camp” by the side of the road near Nipomo, California.  She briefly considered stopping but went ahead, and for the next 20 miles of hard road continuously questioned her decision.  Unable to shake her better judgment, she turned around and drove back to the turn-off for the camp.  Lange drove down the dirt road and found a ramshackle assembly of tents, one of which contained an exhausted mother sitting forlornly with her children, sheltered in a tent fashioned to the rear of the woman’s tireless car.  Lange spent only 10 minutes with the woman, making five exposures.  She learned that “the crops had frozen, and the woman and children were living on vegetables scavenged from the fields, and the few birds that the children managed to catch.  The mother could not leave; she had sold the tires from her car". 

Her photograph created an American Madonna in her Migrant Mother.

George P. Elliott, writing in the introduction for the Lange retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), grasped the essence of the image:

"For an artist like Dorothea Lange who does not primarily aim to make photographs that are ends in themselves, the making of a great, perfect, anonymous photograph is a trick of grace, about which she can do little beyond making herself available for that gift of grace".

Lange describes her encounter as follows:

"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it". (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).  Lange's field notes of the images read: "Seven hungry children. Father is native Californian. Destitute in pea pickers’ camp … because of failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tires to buy food."

Roy Emerson Stryker, who was in charge of the photography project (History Section) for the FSA said of this image:

"When Dorothea took that picture, that was the ultimate. She never surpassed it.  To me it was the picture of Farm Security. She has all the suffering of mankind in her, but all the perseverance too.  A restraint and a strange courage".

 NOTES

1.  The photographic history unit of the FSA morphed into a propaganda arm for the Office of War Information (OWI) in late 1942.

2. Florence Owens Thompson (1903-1983)  is the real name of the Migrant Mother.

3.  The Library of Congress files for the series of photos

People Out of Place: Mailrooms and Traffic Islands, Military, 1918

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This is the U.S. Army mail depot at Regents Park, London, braced for and under siege by  Christmastime mail in 1917. It strikes me that there are not a million items in this photo--at this time in the war there were something like 35 million people in the services for all countries dedicated to the war effort, which is approximately half the number that served in total.  If these letters in this picture were bodies, I reckon that there would be five more rooms like this necessary to tell the visual picture of the war dead and wounded.  This aside, I initially focused on the guy in the rear with the white shirt and tie, standing there pretty much overwhelmed by the task of moving all of that stuff...and perhaps with the idea that much of the mound would wind up being undeliverable because the recipient was killed.  I wonder if that mail was returned, or not?

 

                            

On the other end of the spectrum is this bizarrely-titled photo of a British soldier "guiding" a traffic signal device...the description says that this is the busiest intersection in all of British-occupied France.  Maybe so, but not at this particular time.  Perhaps the photographer should've waited a bit to get a different sort of picture to make his point, rather than settle for this lonely (if not beautifully arranged) situation.

                                                                                                            

Here's the image without the accompanying text, which was supplied for the end-user of the photo by the news service photography supplier. 

 

Portraits Within Portraits: Images of Exhaustion, Defeat and Old Youth

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Earlier today I made a post on some of the images in my collection of WWI News Service Photographs. (These were photos that were sold by an image agency to newspapers and journals which looked for stock photos of, well, whatever, and after paying a use fee would include the photo in the story they were reporting.)  This photo is one of three in a series that show German POWs being marched around a town in France and stopped here and there for a photo.  The picture was taken deep into 1918, within a month or two of the end of the war,.when the Germans were already defeated.  From the look of things, these soldiers were done: tired, mostly beaten, dirty. They at least had most of their buttons on their coats (which is actually a very big deal, keeping your overcoat closed in cold weather to keep warm and alive), their boots looked warn but intact, and they looked not terrible undernourished (though I doubt anyone in the group weighed more than 150 pounds).  

The group is bookended by two remarkable figures:  the soldier on the left looks not 16 or so, but with a not-new ground in toughness.  He's all smooth face and baby fat, though he has at least survived the grueling fighting.  The soldier on the right could be the prototype for any number of propaganda posters that popped up in Berlin in the early 1930's advocating the sold-out but not defeated German soldier of the Great War whose fate must be avenged. 

 Almost everyone was cupping a ciggy.

Lastly, the guy third from the left seems to be a Canadian guard, not that this group was going to try to escape.