Old photographs of American indians

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These photos are from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They are very much a product of their time. If you looked at portraits of English ladies and gentlemen of the same era you would see the same type of posing, with a stern expression on their faces and dressed in their finery.

Photos served a different purpose in those days than they do today. Pictures are common today. Every phone has a camera, innumerable photos can be taken effortlessly, and so candid events are captured. In those earlier times photography was sufficiently complex and exotic that sitting for a portrait was the event. Today you might photograph your lunch to post to Instagram, in those earlier days the act of being photographed was not so frivolous. It was a rare record of you and your family and so it must be treated as a matter of some significance.    

Old crime scene photographs

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These pictures look like they are stills from an old film noir movie, but these are actual crime scene photos from the 1930s-1950s. The photographer Merrick Morton discovered the negatives in 2014, restored them, and cataloged them. They can be scene at the Fototeka LAPD archives.

This small sample of the pictures is via Flashbak's Bloody Brutal Vintage Crime Scene Photos from the Los Angeles Police Department Archives.

Pictures from Scott’s 1911/12 Antarctic expedition

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These are pictures, taken by Herbert George Ponting, of Robert Scott's expedition to the South Pole in the early 20th century. The expedition was a failure, Scott was beat to the South Pole by Admundson by over a month and he and his companions died on the way back to their base camps. However, Pointing had not made the run to the pole and survived the expedition.

The pictures, and those after the jump are from Flashbak's The Great White Silence: Herbert Ponting’s Portraits from Captain Scott’s Antarctic Expedition. The are more pictures and details of the expedition at the link.

Rosie the Riveter, WWI style

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WWII leading to a lot of women in the workforce, personified by Rosie the Riveter, is well known. Less well known is that in WWI a lot of women were also employed in industries. These pictures, and those after the jump, show some of those women on the job.

They are taken from The Public Domain Review's article Women at Work during World War I where there are more.

Photographs of old photographers

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Not exactly self-portraits, but close enough. These pictures, and those after the jump, are a series of photographs of old-timey photographers, some posed and some of them candid. They are from La boite verte's post Des photographes à l’ancienne. There are many more examples at the link.

1960s Florida of tourist memories

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Here's a few pictures of 1960s Florida from a tourist's perspective. Some of the kitsch is gone, some has just evolved. For example, Weeki Wachi, in the picture below got converted from a private tourist trap to a State owned park. The mermaid shows are still being staged.

There are a few more pictures after the jump, and more at Flashbaks post ‘Home to Meet God’ – 1960s Florida in Kodachrome.

So... who did whatever it was that was done?

The picture to the right is of a 1943 police lineup in NY, NY. I don't know what the crime was, nor who, if anybody, was ever picked out of it.

Myself, I suspect the guy second from the left just 'cause he looks like a gangster should look.

It is from an interesting Flickr photostream called LeastWanted. The stream is composed primarily of old mug shots, although there are a fair number of old ID pictures, as well as some other stuff mixed in.

It is an altogether fascinating stream, with face after face, some defiant, some forlorn, some rather crazed looking, documenting long forgotten arrests.

That is of course the interest of nearly every old picture -- who are these people, what is the story behind the picture, and whatever became of them? Questions that realistically will never be answered and so we're left, if we care at all, to create a momentary scenario for them before we move on and forget them.

Below is one more picture from the stream. If nothing else, the hat certainly deserves its own story.