1939 in Sheridan County, Kansas

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These pictures are from the site Photogrammar which is an archive of photos taken between 1935 to 1945 by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information.

The site has an interactive map. I randomly clicked on a box inside of the map and got pictures from 1939 which were taken in Sheridan County, Kansas. It looks like it was a hardscrabble life, but I've read that, during the Great Depression things were generally better on farms than in the city, so maybe they considered themselves lucky.

Enjoy these pictures, and those after the jump. Of course there are many, many more 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.

River Steamboats

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French and English inventors started working on powering boats with steam in the 18th century. By the 19th century steamboat design was well evolved, with both screw and paddle wheel powered variants. To begin, they were commonly used on rivers and lakes where the waters were more placid than the open ocean. The riverine craft are what we associate steamboats with today.

We think of them as the craft on the Mississippi river of westerns, with elegant gamblers and southern belles at the rails. In reality they were rather more mundane and workmanlike craft.

Here and after the jump are several photos of the old boats.

In the time of the British Raj

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A shoe box held 178 plate glass negatives taken over 100 years ago in India during the British Raj. These pictures, and the ones after the jump, are from that set.

If you're interested in such photographs the website Old Indian Photos has many more vintage photographs from India as well as samples of Indian artwork from the period. It's a very nice collection.

Found Films

Found Films is a website I visit from time to time. The person who runs it finds old cameras with film still in them, or some times just rolls of old film, and processes them. Much of the film is damaged, and the resulting pictures sometimes have a dream-like quality to them. He posts and comments on the cameras that made them and the mysteries they reveal. The result is gallery after gallery of lost or discarded photos: family gatherings, portraits, picnics, vacations and all the other minutia of life.

The fascination with these photos is that the anonymous people in them are now all either elderly or gone, and perhaps some have been entirely forgotten. Of course, that is the fate of all of us, and all of us share these same sorts of moments the pictures record. Who knows, perhaps one day our photos will be taken from scrap boxes or lost cameras and posted on the internet to puzzle strangers, but in the meanwhile we can only look at these and wonder what is the story that they tell. 

Here's a few more of the pictures, with more after the jump...