:Pictures of the Past: 1920s, 1930s, 1940s (Yapp, 1998)

 Nick Yapp. Getty Image 1920s, ... 1930s, ... 1940s (1998). Three lively collections of photographs illustrating the lives of our ancestors. The illustrated papers and magazines that provided the images tended to publish the unusual and dramatic (see the 1940s cover), so Yapp must have had a difficult time finding the ones that showed ordinary lives. The photos of political and other significant events are mostly well known. The others provide most of the charm. It’s an odd feeling to experience nostalgia for a world I didn’t actually know (the late 1940s excepted). But that’s what happened. I will likely look at these books again. ***

Poppies (photo)

The oriental poppies are in bloom. They are about 10-15cm (4-6 inches) across. Photo taken after rain, 19th June 2025.

North Channel, Lake Huron, Blind River ON, 2025-04-29

 

I take a few photos of the North Channel about once a month. This a recent one. Windy, about 5C, looking south. Click on it to see it full-screen.

Gold finches, May 2019

 

We have a couple of feeders set up so we can watch them from our dining room. This feeder had to be replaced when squirrels found a way to break in.  

Great photos

Great photos here.https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-53819803
One sample:

Photos of Cobalt and Sudbury (book reviews)

     Two Photo Album reprints: 1894 Souvenir of Sudbury & Cobalt the Silver City. (1981) Exactly what the titles promise, collections of photographs originally issued to boost the images of Sudbury and Cobalt, and attract settlers and investment. The original photographs show the care that went into making these expensive objects. A full plate (5"x7") photographic print cost about half a day’s typical pay. The photographers couldn’t afford to make technically poor negatives or unpleasing images.
     Composition is always workmanlike and often pleasing. Many of the photos show people lined up in front of buildings: an opportunity to have your picture taken for a low price was rare. Most of the pictures show banks and stores, and public buildings such as schools. The signage is sometimes overdone to our eyes: a wall was a great place to catalogue merchandise. There are a few interior shots. All pictures repay close study. One thing I noticed was unpaved roads bordered by wooden sidewalks. The pictures of mines include enough detail for a building models or dioramas.
     Exposure and development was calculated to provide a nice gradation from black to white, with the maximum of detail in the shadows and the highlights. Unfortunately, reprinting printed images always degrades the quality, and both albums suffer from the effects of making photographic copies of halftones. The Cobalt album is somewhat muddy, the Sudbury one somewhat pale. Both will join my modest collection local history books. **½

Photos that Tell a Story: The Picture Post Album

      Robert Kee. The Picture Post Album (1989) Kee’s history of the magazine, Britain’s version of LIFE, which preceded it, but learned from it. Picture Post’s founding owner (Hulton) and editors (Lorant and Hopkinson) wanted to use photography as the medium for telling stories, not as a mere adjunct to text. They succeeded brilliantly, in large part because Hulton was a social reformer, and expected the future to be one of progress in equality and social justice.

        The Second World War began when the Post was barely eleven months old, and it became a major factor in maintaining British morale. It published pictures of all social strata at work and play, of soldiers' and civilians' experience of the war, mixed with a bit of discreet cheesecake and sentiment, and in every issue dealt with some more serious topic such as the future of health care, or the conduct of the war. The photographs were brilliant, and their layout and captions told the story. The amount of text apparently varied, but the Post published articles and short fiction too, as well as leaders (editorials). The magazine could be sharply satirical, as when it published black rectangles instead of the pictures about the home front that the editors wished to print but which the censors forbade.
     But the focus was the pictures, and this book shows us the range of subject matter and style. Many of its images have become the ones that we think of when celebrities and artists of the mid-twentieth century are named.
     The photographers were among those who shifted photography away from vaguely conceived imitation of fine art in other media into its own realm. We now take it for granted that photography can be anything the photographer wants it to be, but that it works best as the record of a moment whose significance isn’t understood until it’s captured in a photo, and that photography can distill meaning as well as any painting, precisely because it fixes what would otherwise be a distorted memory of a glimpse.
     The magazine morphed into the owner’s mouth-piece when Hulton disagreed with the post-war politics of Labour. He also pioneered the advertorial, a dubious honour. That wasn’t what the readers wanted, and TV with its illusion of immediacy cut into the visual reporting of illustrated news magazine. It died in 1957, a parody of itself.
     Hopkinson’s Foreword ends with a hopeful claim that a magazine of high-quality photo-reportage and writing could be viable. He had no inkling of what digital photography and the Web would do to news media.
     A nostalgia trip for anyone who knew the magazine or the times in which it thrived, and a necessary record for those who did not. A search for Picture Post Magazine will produce many of the covers. ***

The Years of Bitterness and Pride (1930s Depression photos)

     Hiag Akmakjian. The Years of Bitterness and Pride (1975) A selection of Farm Security Administration photographs from 1935 to 1943. The Preface reminds us that the project to document the USA in photographs almost didn’t happen, and that it became one of most thorough and complete records of people and places ever undertaken. The photographers made over 250,000 pictures, all of them archived in Washington. A handful have become visual summaries of times and places that Americans that know of them hope will not be forgotten. But I suspect that we now have a couple of generations of Americans for whom the Depression is at best a remembered emotion passed on to them from elderly relatives, not an historical event.
     Yet anyone who sees these images will, I think, be reminded that economic dislocations engendered by laissez-faire capitalism have long-lasting effects on individuals and communities. I wonder what happened to these people who allowed themselves to be photographed. Some are defiant, some look beaten, some see hope around them. All look damaged in mind and spirit a well as in body. And yet the majority rebuilt their lives.
     There have been many collections of FSA images published. Look for them. They are fierce reminders that economic ideologies that mistake money for wealth and profit as a goal will inevitably hurt people. You can search the collection yourself here.
****

Nostalgia on tap: Three by Ron Brown

     Ron Brown. Ghost Towns of Canada (1987) A compilation of Brown’s photos and research. Very good photos, OK history. The title implies a complete record of ghost towns, but there are a few gaps. The most noticeable one is the Coal Branch in Alberta, with Luscar, Mountain Park, Cadomin, etc.
     This is one of Brown’s first books. He’s an amateur historian with a strong streak of nostalgia. The book is a pleasure to look at and read. Very well printed. **½

     Terry Boyle & Ron Brown. Ontario Album (1998) Boyle and Brown present a survey of their collections of Ontario photographs. Their notes are complete enough to give one a sense of place and time. The photos themselves vary in quality, as one might expect, but the images show us what life in Ontario was like. Boyle and Brown have selected the most informative images, not necessarily the most common or popular ones. A good read for anyone who likes to indulge in nostalgia. Very good printing. **½

     Ron Brown. Disappearing Ontario (1999) Another of Brown’s compilations of photos, this time of the remnants of an earlier Ontario. He appears to want a proper program of identifying and preserving heritage buildings and other structures. This survey of what’s still out there makes a good case, especially since some of the buildings and bridges have disappeared, for example the pin-connected truss in Iron Bridge.
     There are a few errors, for example, the simplest truss bridges are not the “king’s” or queen’s” trusses, but kingpost and queenpost trusses. Unfortunately, lackadaisical maintenance has had more to do with the loss of bridges than active destruction, which is the most common fate of buildings.
     A good read, well printed, like Brown’s other works. **½

John Toland. Hitler: the Pictorial Documentary of his Life (1978)

     John Toland. Hitler: the Pictorial Documentary of his Life (1978) Well, it’s a documentary, and a good one for giving an overview of the man. Toland begins each chapter with an excerpt from his biography, and captions round out the narrative. The book is apparently intended for an audience of students and the casually interested, and for them it fulfills its limited purposes.
     However, by presenting a chronicle rather than a story, the book may encourage deeper study. It raises questions. For example, why and how was Hitler able to achieve his goal of political power and domination of Germany? This question unanswered tends to perpetuate the popular misconception that he used some kind of force (never specified in this story, however). For us, the most important lesson is that Hitler ensured that at every step he had at least quasi-legitimate justification for what he did. Legality mattered.
     The political images are almost meaningless without knowledge of the events they portray, but the private, personal life is intelligible to anyone aware of his own milieu. The overall impression is that Hitler’s personal life was that of a man with limited taste who yearned for the apparent sophistication of the moneyed classes. An odd miasma of lower-middleclass respectability hangs over it all.
     The reproduction of the photos is average. Many original photos were of poor quality, or apparently exist only as poor copies of the originals, which doesn’t help. ** (2012)

Linda Shapiro. Yesterday’s Toronto 1870-1910 (1978)

     Linda Shapiro. Yesterday’s Toronto 1870-1910 (1978) A collection of photos with reasonably well-researched captions. Nostalgia trip, really, with selections intended to bring back warm feelings about the Good Old Days, which of course weren’t. But the pictures are useful, and the information for the most part is too. Here and there a few reminders of reality help us understand what rare treats the times at the beach or at the Ex really were: wages were low, cost of living was high. We are much better off now, in all respects. One of my continual annoyances are references to long ago prices without reminders of wages. When a dollar a day was a decent wage for a shop girl, a nickel for tram fare was a lot of money. ** (2010)

Peter Wegenstein. Bahn im Bild 96: Die Salzkammergut-Strecke (1996)

      Peter Wegenstein. Bahn im Bild 96: Die Salzkammergut-Strecke (1996) Over 100 pictures cover this line from Stainach-Irdning to Attnang-Puchheim. A couple pages of text provide a brief history, which reveals that the kilometres are numbered from the south, not from the north as I had always assumed. I rode this line a couple dozen times or more when I went to school in Graz: it was the first or last leg of the journey, and I always felt I was home when I climbed aboard the 4-wheel passenger cars standing on Track 2 at Stainach-Irdning. Good photos, although too many of them focus on the locomotives at the expense of the surrounding landscape. Almost all photos are dated, but most were made in the 1980s and 90s. Earlier photos are hard to come by, probably because many of them were lost or confiscated during WW2. My cousin Dieter gave me this book. *** (2008)

Hans Windisch. Die Neue Foto-Schule (1940)

     Hans Windisch. Die Neue Foto-Schule (1940) Windisch pronounces on the right way to take photographs, develop film, and print enlargements. There is an immense amount of technical data here. Windisch suffers from the German awe of the “Fachmann”, the person with special, expert knowledge, and exhibits a corresponding disdain for the layman, who, he says, is merely a “Roboter” when he follows rules and guidelines without knowing the technical basis for them. In other words, the tone of this book is offensive, however much useful data it contains. And much of the data was even more useful back then, when a good deal of the chemistry of film photography was still being explored, and manufacturing techniques weren’t capable of the consistent high quality that became available after the war.
     Windisch is a born teacher; his explications of the theory underlying the technology are models of clarity. It’s a pity his tone is that of the superior expert deigning to share his knowledge with the humble bumbling amateur. He is also quite vain. Over half of the photos he offers as examples are his, and he is, at best, merely capable. He has good technique but no art. This may be related to his belief that the art of photography were merely a matter of sound understanding of some underlying science.
     A series of pictures with text is offered as an example of how to tell a story through pictures. It’s quite good, except for its subject and tone. It consists of a number of head shots taken of the man who is rowing the photographer and his wife across Lake Chiem to an island. The man is talking about his former girlfriend, who gave him some troubles. “But not to worry – there are plenty of others where she came from”. This is told in Windisch’s version of the Bavarian dialect. I suppose he thought it was humorous, and such, but it comes across as condescending to the man and nastily indifferent to his wife, who is listening to the story, too.
     An interesting and curious book, not least because of the high quality of printing and paper. The war-induced shortages had not yet hit German life in 1940. *** for the technical content, 0 for everything else. (2006)

Laurence Waters. Oxfordshire Railways (1991)

     Laurence Waters. Oxfordshire Railways (1991) Peter gave me this book, a collection of photographs covering the main and branch lines in the (present) Oxfordshire. Since most of the lines in Oxon were GWR, most of the photos show that line. The emphasis is on locomotives, with precious little rolling stock, but there are a few interesting shots of stations, junctions, and the like. The lower photo on page 85 shows a the Great Western Society excursion lined up in front of No 17 Sapper at the Bicester Ordnance Depot in 1973. Roger, UP and AR are easily recognisable. Cool!
     Photo reproduction is fair, considering when the book was printed. The map is too small, and is clearly drawn for someone already familiar with Oxfordshire and its railways. Like most books of its kind, it has little appeal outside the world of railway enthusiasts, however. Modellers will find some useful information here and there, but on the whole it doesn’t add to the typical modeller’s information. But I liked it. **½ (2006)

JoAnn Roe. The Real Old West: Photographs by Frank Matsura. (1981)

     JoAnn Roe. The Real Old West: Photographs by Frank Matsura. (1981) Matsura arrived in Conconully, Washington State, to take a job as cook’s helper in the local hotel. He quickly established himself as photographer, however, and when he died ten years later of tuberculosis, people from miles around attended his funeral. His photographic skills are evident in this selection of some 150 images, all taken in the Okanogan (NB the US spelling) on both sides of the border. He himself is a puzzle: very little is known of his antecedents, and the few clues haven’t apparently helped much in discovering his Japanese family, nor the reasons why he left there.
     But his pictures tell us a good deal about him, because he was able to capture the trust of his subjects, all of whom gaze into the camera with self-possession and self-assurance. He also took pains to record the business and social life, and the landscape of the area. I found this book in Donalda (Alberta) in the summer, and bought it because of its photos of buildings and transport; but in the several times I’ve looked through it this year, I came to admire Matsura’s sense of composition and his skill in presenting the characters of his portrait subjects. A very good book, with a mystery at its heart. *** (2005)

Roger Cook and Karl Zimmerman. Magnetic North: Canadian Steam in Twilight (1999)

     Roger Cook and Karl Zimmerman. Magnetic North: Canadian Steam in Twilight (1999) In 1954 and ‘55, the authors, then teenagers, travelled from New York to Montreal and Canada to observe and photograph Canadian steam locos. Their account of their travels and their encounters with Canadian steam is evocative and personal. The photos are very good; and they were able to persuade Jim Shaughnessy, Don Wood and others to contribute photos to complement their story and illustrate the long ending of the steam era in Canada. Marie gave me this book for Christmas. It’s published by Boston Mills Press, and exhibits their usual very high standard of bookmaking, no typos, good looking page layouts, and superb photo reproduction. It's unlikely that teenaged railfans would be allowed to go on a similar quest these days. *** (2005)

Subways without people (link)

Eerie subway photos. Take a look here: Nick Frank's Subway Photos Nicely done. Show how digital has changed photography completely. ****

King Street at night

We were walking back to the hotel after a pretty good meal of Indian food at the Aroma (recommended) when I took this photo. I like Toronto at night, the mix of coloured lights, the reflections in the windows, the people on the sidewalks, the traffic, and of course the streetcars. Anything that runs on rails is worth watching. I know the photo is blurred, but I like the effect anyhow.

Byzantine Churches of Alberta (Book Review)

Orest Shemchishen. Byzantine Churches of Alberta (1976) Edited by Hubert Hohn. Shemchishen was commissioned to record country churches serving Orthodox congregations before they dwindled away and the churches were pulled down. He succeeds admirably. Hubert Hohn, at the time curator of the Edmonton Art Gallery,  contributes an Introduction of several pages and many words, which can be summarised as “Documentary photography succeeds when we see that the subject of the photograph mattered to the photographer.” This happens to be true for Shemchishen’s work: the pictures both record the fact of the buildings’ existence, the details of their architecture and settings, and also the sense that economic and social changes have made them superfluous. They stand on the prairie, isolated. The light clarifies their substance. The interiors, silent and empty, allude to the performance of the sacred rites for which they were built.
     There are no people in any of the photos. One is surrounded by cars and trucks that indicate a liturgy is in progress in the church: it stands out as an anomaly. Most of the churches, although well-kept, already seem like relics of a past that few recall, and fewer will narrate.
     This collection of photographs is more than a source book. Hohn is right: Shemchishen’s work shows that these buildings meant something to him. Worth looking at more than once. ***

The Hugging Trees

The hugging trees on December 26 2012. See March 8 post for an earlier photo.