The Folks Back Home

It's very difficult, at least for me, to make out the long inscription on this Real Photo postcard, but the language is apparently German, and it may be from Switzerland. It shows three women, two men, a boy holding a gun, and a dog, posing in a group in front of a vine-covered cottage. There's a flourishing garden in the foreground, possibly including poppies, and a whole social history in the hats the figures wear, no two of which are alike.

The very few bits I can make out in the inscription on the reverse of the card include the names Meinhof and Dietrich and a reference to an address of (I think) Kapellenstr[asse] 31, which might be in Bern or Basel. The most intriguing is a reference to America, including the name of the state of Kansas in parentheses. Perhaps some of the family members were now living in the New World.

Just a few scratch-marks in ink now, but they were presumably perfectly legible to the recipients, whoever they may have been.

Postscript: When I came up with a title for this post perhaps I had in mind these lyrics by Peter Blegvad:

I sent a card to the folks back home
a picture of a burning aerodrome
it came back stamped: address unknown
I was alone
in the meantime

María

This postcard portrait of a woman who signed only her first name was addressed to one Señora Doña Leonora de Esteban in Castro Urdiales in northern Spain. There's no date or trace of a stamp or postmark; the elegantly-penned inscription reads "To demonstrate once again the love that your friend professes for you, she dedicates to you this little memento." María was clearly not only well educated but possibly (if the desk is any indication) an educator. She wears heavy, dark clothing with an elaborate embroidered motif. I imagine her as unmarried, part of a nascent class of independent female professionals, writing to a former colleague who had married and moved away, but that's basically nothing but speculation. I'm not sure if this portrait was taken in a studio or (more likely) on location, but the use of the window to open up the background is an effective touch.

Rafael A. Idelmón, a native of Madrid, opened a photographic studio in Valladolid in January 1860 and another in Palencia four years later; his descendants were reportedly still in business at least until 1927, and a living descendant named Enrique del Rivero Cuesta is active as a professional photographer, continuing a family association with the camera lasting more than a century and a half. The portrait of María is presumably from the first decades of the twentieth century, and may be the work of one of Rafael's sons or an employee of the firm. I'm not sure what the initials G.I.F.A.G. stand for, though I'm guessing that they indicate membership in a gremio or trade association.

Americans (V)

Langston

The image above is unlabelled, but knowing that its likely provenance was Oklahoma made it possible to take a guess at its location. It was printed in the real photo postcard format that was used by both commercial and amateur photographers to create mailable photographic prints, and the particular variety of Azo postcard stock on which it was printed is believed to have been manufactured between 1904 and 1918. There was only one historically black institute of higher education in the state of Oklahoma at that time, and that was the Colored Agricultural and Normal University (now Langston University) in Langston, Oklahoma. As it turns out, the guess was right; a little digging produced this photographic montage from The Oklahoma Red Book published in 1912:

Below is a closer view of the school's Mechanical Building:

Here's the same building, from the university's 1911-12 catalog:

The building in these pictures is a close fit for the one shown in the postcard, although the latter is more of a close-up and the entire smokestack is not shown. (There are no trees in the Red Book photo, which perhaps was actually taken several years earlier, before they were planted.) The identity of the young woman remains unknown, but at least we know where she was, and why she was there: she was taking advantage of one of the few opportunities for educational advancement open to African-Americans in the state of Oklahoma.

The two photos below may also possibly show Langston students, but from a later period; if so, then the family whose album this belonged to saw not just one but several members pass through Langston's doors.

The portrait photo of the male graduate is undated and unidentified, but judging by the mount it is probably later than the postcard of the young woman holding a book. The group photo is dated "Class of '33,'" and bears the inscription "From Baby to Mother Rebecca" (there is an arrow in ink over the head of the third woman from the right), which might make an identification possible (although it's not clear whether "Rebecca" was the student or the given name of "Mother Rebecca").

With these photos, or with the photo of "Laurence" from the preceding post, which might be a bit more recent, the trail grows cold. At some point, the family's careful custody of their photographic heritage came to an end. Perhaps they died out, or surviving members moved on or lost interest in their past. We don't know. Some of the photos were damaged by time and the elements or even deliberately defaced; but they survive, and even in their fragmentary fashion they carry reminders of the powerful currents of American history that formed them.

The town and university of Langston are named for John Mercer Langston, who among many other accomplishments was the first black member of the US House of Representatives from the state of Virginia. His great-nephew, the poet Langston Hughes, wrote these lines:

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

Americans (I)

These photographs represent what are apparently fragments of a single African-American family album or family collection that was recently broken up and sold at auction. The photographs, which date from c. 1880 to at least 1933, offer only a few clues to the sitters' identities and histories, but if they do represent the members of a single, much-extended family (which is not quite certain), then through them we can trace a rough network of family connections and spanning at least four states and roughly fifty years of American history.


In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Darryl Pinckney wrote "In the US, white people are able to conceive of black people who are better than they are or worse than they are, superior or inferior, but they seem to have a hard time imagining black people who are just like them." The most striking thing about most of the photographs presented here, and in the posts that will come, the thing that shouldn't be striking at all, is how ordinary they are. What they reflect is the bedrock of experience: ties of kinship and friendship, rites of passage, memory across generations — the very things, that is, whose existence among black people has often been denied or downplayed. In their fragmentary way, these images remind us that, whatever our histories or notions of identity may be, most of us want basically the same things and will vigorously pursue them — if the doors aren't shut in our faces.

Future posts will examine these and additional photographs from the collection in greater detail.

On the town

Two men with lit cigars and a third man, seated, whose own smoke is still tucked in his pocket. Though the postcard was never addressed or mailed and the location is unknown, we may be looking at the interior of a nickelodeon or amusement parlor; an advertising sign behind the men, difficult to make out, may read "Isis Moving Pictures" or "Isis Motion Pictures," and the stirrups of what could possibly be a coin-operated horse appear at left. There were establishments bearing the Isis name in various cities. Or maybe we're looking at something else entirely.

"Jack Begley" is probably too common a name to assign to any identifiable individual; "Bedsoe" is a bit more unusual. But like the man in the dark suit, they've had their time.

Velox Real Photo postcard, c.1907-1914.

Nannie Wilson

The young woman whose likeness was captured in this Real Photo postcard image was a schoolteacher in Red Wing (or Redwing), Kansas in 1907-08. The names of her pupils are neatly written on the back of the card:

Harry Hall Willie Ruble Amelia Proksch August Proksch James Ruble Matilda Heoffner Blanch Cliff Carl Winkle Joseph Heoffner Ethel Bailey

Alloys Heoffner Dell Wylie Richard Bailey Stella Ruble Regina Smith Anna Proksch Rosine Winkle Isabell Bailey Joe Proksch James Bailey

Below the names is the following inscription: "In loving remembrance of days spent to-gether in district 31./ Nannie Wilson / Teacher".

There are twenty students listed but some of the surnames are repeated (there are four children named Bailey, four named Proksch), so Wilson undoubtedly taught a range of ages at the same time, presumably in one room. Amy Bickel, who writes the Dead Towns in Kansas blog and has photos of the area as it looks now, includes Redwing today among the state's more than 6,000 ghost towns.

There are identifiable traces of a number of Nannie Wilson's pupils in census records and other online sources, but I'm not inclined to pursue them. Perhaps in this case I just feel that the stories of these people don't belong to me, that I have no right to them.

Kansas

"Just a few of our crowd and guess you will know the majority of them. If not will tell you of them later." Mailed from Salina, Kansas to nearby Culver in either 1906 or 1908. The recipient was a Miss Blanche Caldwell.

"Made by Frank E. Mohler McPherson Kans." The Mohler family name was common among the members of the Church of the Brethren, a pietist (and historically pacifist) sect with roots in Schwarzenau, Germany. The individuals in this photo may have been associated with McPherson College, a Brethren-founded institution.

The fact that Frank E. Mohler had his name and address pre-printed on the back of the card suggests that he may have been a professional photographer, at least briefly. His identity is complicated somewhat by the fact that various records mention a Frank Ellis Mohler and a Frank Martin Mohler, both of whom had ties to religious institutions and to Kansas. Frank Martin Mohler, who seems to have been the elder of the two by a few years, attended Washburn College in Topeka and later went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, before serving for a number of years as a Y.M.C.A. missionary in China. The less distinguished Frank E. Mohler was a teacher in McPherson during World War I, but then seems to have headed west; a man by that name is recorded as having sold water heaters in San Diego around 1930, having operated a bookstore there in the later 1940s, and having died in 1960.

The image above, taken by the Garver studio in Dodge City, Kansas, shows the Prough family. The Artura stock on which it was printed was manufactured from 1908-1924. There are various records of that family name in Dodge City during those years, but I haven't been able to identify the family more specifically.

All three of these photographs were printed as Real Photo postcards.

The living

These two faded and stained studio portraits of African-American couples were taken sometime in the early decades of the twentieth century and printed on postcard stock. The one above, which is probably the earlier of the two, is the work of the Flett Studio in Atlantic City, which operated for at least fifteen years or so and must have produced countless similar images. "Mr. & Mrs...," followed by a family name, has been written on the back, but I can't make out the surname. The third figure, standing in the center, may have been the best man at the couple's wedding, or just a relative or friend.

There's even less we can say about the couple below, except that they're dressed to the nines. The studio is unidentified, but the Azo postcard stock used was manufactured from 1904-1918. Like the first postcard, this one was never mailed.

When an artifact is removed from its context without adequate documentation some of its potential for bearing information is lost; we no longer know as much about how it relates to the world that created it. The orphaned photographs above would be much more potent if we knew anything at all about the sitters' identities, life stories, occupations, and families, but people die childless or separated from their families, children have their own lives to lead and can't be bothered, any number of things can sever the thread. Things drift off and go their own ways.

*

The Dead in Frock Coats

In the corner of the living room was an an album of unbearable photos,
many meters high and infinite minutes old,
over which everyone leaned
making fun of the dead in frock coats.

Then a worm began to chew the indifferent coats,
the pages, the inscriptions, and even the dust on the pictures.
The only thing it did not chew was the everlasting sob of life that broke
and broke from those pages.

— Carlos Drummond de Andrade; translation by Mark Strand

Ties

Around the beginning of the 20th century a marriage took place between two nascent media: the postcard, which was becoming the source of an enormous international craze, and amateur photography, a hobby democratized by Eastman Kodak's affordable and portable cameras. The result was the "real photo postcard," continuous-tone photographic prints made directly onto postcard stock, huge numbers of which were created by both amateurs and professionals. While the professional studios made both individual portraits commissioned by customers and mass-produced souvenir postcards in runs of thousands, the amateurs generally made unique prints. Large numbers of the latter survive; although designed to be mailed, many never were, or were enclosed in envelopes and thus never postmarked. Some of the images are fascinating (there are several excellent books devoted to them) but most are fairly dull. They were made for a specific purpose, as keepsakes, to exhibit the likeness of a loved one or the old homestead or the graduating class, imbued with meaning for the photographer and the recipient, but not conveying much to strangers. Separated from their context, they are largely mute.

The obvious amateur image at the top of the page is a little different; while it presents no drama, it does give us a sense of the subject's location and integration within an active, occupied urban space. The card stock was produced by Velox, a company acquired by Kodak in 1902, and this particular variety, which is marked "Made in Canada," was probably manufactured between 1907 and 1914. It bears no address and no identification of the woman in the foreground, although based on provenance I suspect that it was taken in the province of Quebec, perhaps in Quebec City itself. The pyramidal roofs of the skyline at right might potentially make an exact identification of the location possible.

Half of the woman's face is in shadow, as is the street behind her, and a stray fiber appears to have been captured in the printing process at top right, but the image is not without interest in spite of these flaws. If you look carefully (a magnifying glass helps), you can make out on the left side several figures stoop-sitting down the length of the block, the second set of stairs has some kind of ornate stencilled pattern on its vertical surfaces, and there may be an awning projecting from a storefront in the far distance. And then there are the overhead wires, which, like almost everything in this picture, provide a glimmer of connection. The poles, the wires, the street, the sidewalk, the stoop-sitters, the buildings clustered together, all speak of a world in which the texture of an individual's existence is inextricably entwined in sophisticated networks of interaction, communication, transportation, and marketing.

There's no snow on the sidewalk, but there appears to be some piled against the curb on the far side of the street. The child sitting closest to us, who is paying no attention to the woman or the photographer, is wearing a snug wool cap. It's perhaps the end of winter, and the woman has likely removed her own head covering to pose for the camera. A moment later she will move away, but the city that surrounds her will keep on humming even when she's gone.

Three portraits

Three more Real Photo postcards, possibly from western Pennsylvania. The one above has the following inscription on the reverse of the card:

Mother Moser [or possibly "Moses"]
Mother's Sister
Mariah Knotts
& Son & his child

This conceivably could be the Mariah Knotts who was born in 1836 and died in Franklin, Pennsylvania in 1915. The Cyko cardstock on which the image is printed was manufactured from 1904 into the 1920s. The other two cards, which bear no inscriptions, are on Azo stock that is roughly contemporary.

Scenes of Rural Life

The images on this page reproduce part of a group of Real Photo postcards that may have originated in western Pennsylvania. The one above is probably the oldest; it's printed on postcard stock, in this case sold by an unknown manufacturer, that became obsolete around 1907, when postal regulations were updated to permit including a message, in addition to the mailing address, on the reverse of the card. The wall behind the adolescent boy has been decorated with a variety of posters and advertisements, though it's difficult to read the lettering because of the angle and the exposure. Even so, the central image of the boy and his horse is nicely composed.

The remainder are later, printed on Azo postcard stock manufactured from 1918-1930, and may be the work of a single photographer, one who developed his own images but hadn't quite mastered the printing process. In the first, an oval frame was employed, but only on the right side. Note the rungs on the tree to enable climbing. The name "Harold Bixler" is written on the back.

The image below, of a woman holding a cat, is even more askew (these scans are aligned with the axes of the cardstock, not of the print).

In the composite below, I have juxtaposed the two cards to show how the ragged edge and the dark background on the left side apparently align. If I'm correct, the two prints must have been made at the same time.

The awkwardly exposed image below may also belong with the previous two; if rotated 90° to the left, it also is a possible candidate for aligning with the top of the print of the woman with the cat.

The dark backgrounds framing these three prints appear to be previously exposed film. I don't really understand the developing technique involved here, but it's clear the photographer was improvising, probably with minimal training and rudimentary equipment. That would make sense given the general poverty and isolation of the scenes, but it says something that he or she was driven, even under less than optimal conditions, to preserve a little bit of the surrounding world.

None of these postcards were ever addressed or mailed.

The platform

Three women in elaborate hats, two men in railway uniforms, a third man — and a very large dog. Real Photo postcard, location unidentified but evidently rural; printed on a variety of Azo photographic paper reportedly manufactured between 1904-1918. There's no inscription or address on the back.

Group Portrait on a Hillside

The first few times I looked at this Real Photo postcard, without benefit of magnification, I succumbed to an optical illusion so strong that I still struggle with it even after multiple viewings and close inspection. In the middle distance, running horizontally across some two-thirds of the image, I saw what was apparently a body of water, with a white line of sand at the base of the hills in the background, and two small white sailboats, one at the far left and the other just below the man's left hand... except that none of it is real. The shoreline is in fact the apex of what appears to be a single long roof, the "sails" are architectural features of that roof, and there is no "middle distance," as the building — whatever it is — blocks out what lies behind it. There may be a river on the valley floor, but if so we can't see it.

That illusion, and the fact that we are so high up relative to the long building that nearly all we can see of it is its roofline, is only one of the unusual elements of this photo; note also that the photographer appears to have shot from a very low angle, right down in the weeds, probably in order to get the hills in the distance in the same frame. There's an incredible amount of detail in the background, much of which emerges only when the image is blown up: houses, outbuildings, smoke rising from a chimney, railway trestles.


On the right side of the close-up below, just to the left of the sharply sloping filigreed roof of another building, is a dark vertical object that may be a pipe or some kind of cast-iron structure, and running across its base are two faint parallel lines that may be telegraph wires.


Even further to the right, and completely invisible to the naked eye without magnification (at least, invisible to my naked eye), is one more ghostly, chimneyed building, so faint it almost blends into the distant hills:


In the center of the frame we see three women and one man, probably the husband of the woman whose hand he barely touches. Someone's straw boater has been set down among the tall weeds at their feet. If you look back to the full image you can see that there's a well-worn path directly behind them, visible on the left side.


The card, which was printed on a variety of Velox photographic paper manufactured from 1903-04, bears no postmark, mailing address, or other clues to the identity of the subjects or the location; the topography should be identifiable but is unfamiliar to me. The hills in the background are mostly barren, as if they had been clear-cut recently, and the houses look like new construction. I'm guessing that we're looking at a boom town, perhaps in a mining area. (Manitou Springs, Colorado has been suggested.)

Two group portraits

These two Azo Real Photo postcards date from roughly the same period (c. 1904-1918) and may or may not have any connection with each other. Only the first, which has "Mary Ertwine Bloomsburg Pa" penciled on the back, has any kind of identification. Because of the mix of ages of the women, and the informal attire of the two kneeling men, I suspect that we're looking at a group of fellow employees rather than, for instance, students at Bloomsburg's Normal School, and the four women in the rear are standing on what is probably the end of a loading dock. Some of the women pictured appear quite cheerful, although the one at far left, clutching what may be a folded outer garment, seems lost in thought and, like one or two of the others, isn't looking in the direction of the camera at all. Overall it looks like the work of a professional photographer, though there are no marks on the back to prove that. There are two six-pointed stars on either side of the central platform, and the arm closest to the door of each star has been truncated.


The second photo shows what is probably a school group, mixed in age with the girls on the left and the boys on the right. The foreground is unpaved and stony and the kids don't look particularly well-off, although one of the boys on the far right is wearing a necktie, as if his parents had dressed him up for the day knowing that this picture would be taken. Some can be assumed to be siblings based on their proximity and matching dress. Hardly anyone is showing anything that could be taken for a smile, and the male teacher (if that's what he is) is staring off into the distance. You can see through the window into the interior of the building but it's hard to make out what's inside.