Having Fun Yet?

Old photo, circa 1920s – 1930s.

Price:  $8.00          Size:  About 4 and 1/4″ x 2 and 1/4″

Continuing on with a mini-theme of families or groups of people. This one is a stumper. Where were they? The major clue, if we can call it that, appears on our left….something Ranch. Had the camera been pointing slightly more in that direction (or the photographer further back), we probably could have figured it out. Maybe “something-or-other Ranch” was a restaurant. Do we imagine we see a small outdoor dining table there covered in white cloth? The other clue (for some ingenious person) is the out-of-place looking geometric metal? phone booth-ish (space ship, time portal, 😉 ) thing at the far right, that we only see a portion of. What the heck was it? Then the people depicted here….Looking like, I hesitate to say it, a family of con-artists. Maybe it’s the younger girl – the stony-faced look and the cool octagonal sunglasses, note her grip on her grandma’s arm (yes, we remember that smiling into the camera was not mandatory, like it pretty much is today – refreshing, really – scowl if you want to) and her sister – with that trick of the eye – one eye closed, the other squinting slightly, not a wink though, but different….how did the camera catch that? Now, the dark-skinned gentleman on our right, is he the dad of the girls and the (nice-looking) older brother? Dad sun-bronzed from years of outside work…..or are they a wealthy bunch and this man is their driver (but part of the family) and native to (imagining) Central America. Well, idiotic questions like these are in abundance. Notice, too, how the whole gang is dressed in white except for the matron of the bunch. Makes you think this snapshot was taken in one of the southern states, Florida or southern Calfiornia, perhaps? Anyway, every picture tells a story, as they say, and what this one tells is……open to impression….flashes of insight appearing and disappearing…..in the end, I’d say they’re a nice, very stylish family with a million stories to tell. Oh, and this photo had been in the family album for some time, as evidenced by some of the black paper still stuck to the back.

Just A Pretty Girl

Just A Pretty Girl m1

Here’s a vintage sepia-toned photo of a beautiful young woman with a wavy bob hairstyle, wearing a sleeveless “evening-wear” type dress fashioned partially from tulle (a sheer fine netting made from silk, nylon or rayon) . The photo looks to have been hand-tinted with the pale sea-green and pink coloring on parts of the dress. She wears a short strand of pearls and has a beautifully sweet, but confident, maybe a little worldly expression. This is postcard size but not a postcard. There are no markings on the back, but it evidently had just been saved in a scrapbook. Besides the obvious missing right corner, there are lots of foxing type marks on the photo, especially noticeable is the mark on her right cheek, but well, we’ll just call that a beauty mark 😉  If we look closely at the dress itself, we see a little more detail:  Is that a rose-like faux flower on the left side, or could it have been a corsage? Also, we see part of a satin or velvet-looking ribbon running horizontally (under her left forearm) on the dress dividing part of the tulle with a heavier fabric of perhaps taffeta or silk.

Studio photo, circa 1920s. Photographer unknown.

Price:  $6.00