Super 'gloo

I can't get enough of vintage hand-tinted photographs, and recently bought these examples. They're from the Winter Carnival in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the buildings are called Ice Palaces or, in the case of the bottom image, the Ice Court. There was a huge skating rink in front of that semi-circular structure. Each has the date 1938 on the back, but it seems the first one is from 1939, the second from 1937, and the last from '38. They're stamped Arrow Photo Service, Minneapolis, Minn.

Why was it important to color these photos to sell to tourists?

"At night electric lights illuminated these crystal palaces in patterns of changing color." "Their brilliant lighting consumed as much electricity in ten days as a town of 7,000 inhabitants normally required in a year." ("Ice Palaces" by Fred Anderes and Ann Agranoff; Abbeville Press, Inc., New York , 1983.)

There is some wonderful related imagery here.



And just because I'm easily distracted and enjoy vernacular architecture, too, I'm adding this image of more great ice structures, an Inuit village on Baffin Island circa 1865.

Mysterious Heart

Hard to Fit

He looked all over to find a shirt that fit.

Artful Enterprise

Photos While-U-Wait, Shooting Gallery, Budweiser On Tap and Sandwiches. It's like Homer Simpson's favorite business ever.

But I'm an art lover, so what I see is like Walker Evans took this picture and mailed it to Edward Hopper for the scene just past the swinging half-doors, and he mailed it to Jasper Johns for the neon target over the door, and he mailed it to Warhol for the photobooth snaps, and then Chris Burden shows up to get shot, literally. Plus beer and sandwiches.

Eh, I get carried away. But I think it's a crazy concept, The Barn.

Poultryphilia

Once I was riding an elevator car in an upscale residential building in NYC with a man who I knew to be, well, blunt in his assessments. In truth, he was a psychiatrist (but I was only visiting, swear). Anyway, a little elderly lady gets on, and she's holding one of those tiny, profusely hairy animals that some people call a dog. You know the kind, you can't see their eyes, and their weight is measured in ounces. The doctor says gruffly, "Isn't it amazing what people can love?" Being Southern, I wasn't supposed to laugh. Being appalled, I couldn't help it.

That memory sometimes comes to mind when I see something in which people take a bewildering pride.

Such as in these real photo postcards, where folks have posed for posterity with their favorite chickens.

Chickens.

Raw Power

Yesterday's post of the photographer's self-portrait brought to mind one of more evocative images I own. It too is a real photo postcard, and shows a man with a very young child dressed in white on his knee. The expression on his face, which I read as pure shell-shocked grief, just begs the story. I imagine that his wife. the child's mother, has died, and now he faces a frightening future without her, the daunting prospect of being a father alone and poor. Note the patch on his pants at the knee. It's remarkable that he chose to have this portrait made. I think of it as a sort of post-post-mortem. The condition of the card, stained and stepped on, just amplifies the effect. I put it right up there with Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother portrait.