JF Ptak Science Books

Signs of Discrimination: Photographs from the Library of Congress FSA Collections

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All of the photographic material below comes from the U.S. Library of Congress website for its prints and photographs division, and is a very small sample of what is offered from its online holdings of Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA and OWI) photographs. It is not ancient history--most of the images are 75 years old or so, a part of our near-past which still shadows our near-future.

"Photographers working for the Farm Security Administration Historical Section (later transferred to the Office of War Information) were encouraged to document continuity and change in many aspects of life in America during the years the unit was in operation. They were particularly encouraged to photograph billboards and signs as one indicator of such developments. Although no documentation has been found to indicate that photographers were explicitly encouraged to photograph racial discrimination signs, the collection includes a significant number of this type of image, which is rarely found in other Prints and Photographs Division collections."

On of the great innovations in a sea of great things accomplished during the Franklin Roosevelt administrations was the formation of the FSA, a division of the government established to help farmers through the devastating Dust Bowl and Great Depression.  A subset of the FSA was a photographic unit which was set up to document the progress made by the FSA (and provide, I am sure, for some much-needed good news, a hearts-and-minds campaign).  This division was headed by Roy Emerson Stryker, who wound up hiring a collection of dream-team photographers unlike any ever assembled for a single purpose.  Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins, Mary Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Gordon Parks, Charlotte Brooks, John Vachon, Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn were sent out all across the country and wound up with the greatest and most beautiful photographic history ever assembled.  There were about 77,000 images made, and I recall reading (somewhere) that the total budget for the Stryker group for the years 1936-19421 was about $100,000, meaning that each completed image cost just over a dollar apiece.

1) Bethlehem-Fairield shipyards, Baltimore, Maryland. May 1943. Arthur Siegel, photographer. "A drinking fountain." [Sign: "White."] Location: D-90666 Reproduction Number: LC-USW3-26442-E [view catalog record]	1
2) Memphis, Tennessee. October 1939. Marion Post Wolcott, photographer. "Secondhand clothing stores and pawn shop on Beale Street." [Sign: "Hotel Clark, The Best Service for Colored Only."] Location: E-2185 Reproduction Number: LC-USF33-30637-M3 [view catalog record]	2
3) Durham, North Carolina. May 1940. Jack Delano, photographer. "A street scene near the bus station." Location: E-255 Reproduction Number: LC-USF33-20522-M5 [view catalog record]	3
4) Durham, North Carolina. May 1940. Jack Delano, photographer. "At the bus station." Location: E-5153 Reproduction Number: LC-USF33-20522-M2 [view catalog record]	4

 

The History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things--German POWs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1556

In continuing series of posts on Blank and Empty Things is this image on fading, disappearing German prisoners of war.  The French had been pounding them in western France in the summer of 1918, and Germans were surrendering and being captured by the thousands.  This news service photograph shows one of the assembly camps with about 10,000 POWs--I made a heavy scan of the group of soldiers in the distance and was  a little taken aback to see that the men had lost their human forms,  looking like bacteria, fading into their future.  

The full image is impressive, and shows just a small fraction of the men taken prisoner during 1918; and it shows even a lesser percentage of those killed.

 
This detail of the foreground shows the familiarity necessitated by the men being pressed so closely together--there was little free ground
.

Also, I thought that the French soldiers in the midst of the prisoner might've been feeding them, but it seems as though they were just walking in their midst.

 

Barbed Wire, Trench Warfare, and the Next Lethal Step: Electric WIres

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1555   [Part of the History of Lines series]

Barbed wire was one of the most successful and horrifying defensive weapons of World War I.  In 1915 it was made more effective yet by adding high-voltage electricity to the emplacements.  In general the electrical barbed wire fence was employed as only a tiny fraction of all wire fences during the war--as the non-electrified fence was already extremely effective, very cheap to produce and very easily installed--but the possibility of finding an electrified wire somewhere along the lengthy rat's nests of mile sand miles of this thing must've had some sort of weight in most soldiers' minds. 

The following image (and details) from The Illustrated London News for 9 October 1915:

And the places where the barbed wire was made and packaged, again from The Illustrated London News for 16 October 1915.

It looks as though the wire was stretched across 3.5 foot poles, with the barbed wire added diagonally, and then rolled up in long sections for easy transport and deployment.

Crowd Series--Find the Hat, NYC, WWII

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Funny how in so many of these big crowd picture that I've performed surgery on that hats seem to be an issue.  For example, there's this iconic photograph by Weegee (Arthur Felig, born Usher Felig in the Ukraine, 1898-1909, a man who lived for "the shot" and got it over and over again, evidently at the cost of just about everything else in his life) of the crowds at Coney Island. ("Weegee" was the phonetic spelling of Ouija, a moniker given to the man because he seemed be able to intuit the location of a crime or action of some sort.  It helped that he was the only journalist/photographer given a license to have a police-band radio receiver at home and in his car. 

So far as I can tell there is only one man in a hat--the guy in the bottom right corner of the image, and he's wearing a fedora at that.  The person at 10:00 from him--white-hatted with a plastic visor--may be a man, too, in which case I'll have to amend this a little to restrict hats to fedoras.  And wearing it, too, at the time of the photo--there's another man in there somewhere who is doffing his boater to the photographer.  And that's about it.  Not much sand in this picture.

It is a little unusual, this hat business--but Weegee at least has captured hats in unusual places.  Finding his bread buttered by crime photography and the gritty aspect of late-night city life, Weegee documented all manner of criminal activities in NYC during the 1930's-1950's, including more than his fair share of Mafia slayings.  I recall several of this photographs featuring the "hit" face-down on the pavement or on the table-clothed tabletop, hat still firmly in place. MOMA bought several of Weegee's works in the 1940's for an exhibit called "Action Photography"--which I guess would describe Weegee's work, though if the action was starkly captured by a flash at night in tough surroundings, the description might be better. 

This photograph by Weegee captures a few sailors in their caps, which I'm not sure count.  Primary in this photo though is the man in the middle, wearing a mask (for reasons unknown). 

The Leonardo Hands of Girl Convicts, Newcastle Prison, 1871.

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1538     [Original source photos from Retronaut.]

Undoubtedly the Industrial Revolution passed many by in Newcastle upon Tyne, a metropolitan borough of Tyne and Wear, in North East England.  Its an ancient place, and at one time enjoyed a high Victorian economic mission for production and shipping.  And just as in any time, many were left behind by progress.  These are photographs--mug shots--of children arrested and convicted of petty crimes, sent packing to Newcastle Prison, in 1871.   It seems to me that their hands could do little mischief, their crimes coming I suspect from hunger or need.  

The hands of Mary Catherine Docherty, serving seven days hard labor for the theft of  iron.  Age:  14.

These hands belonged to Ann Burns, serving 1 month,  convicted of stealing a waistcoat. Age:  18.

The hands of Jane Farrell, serving ten days hard labor for the theft of two boots.  Age:  12.

The hands of Catherine Kelly, sentenced to three months in prison for the theft of bed linens.  Age:  17.

 
The hands of Ellen Woodman, sentenced to seven days of hard labor for stealing iron.  Age:  11

Alice Mullholland, sentenced to three months in Newcastle prison for the theft of boots.  Age:  18.

I suspect that these girls were told to hold their hands together to steady their body for the long exposure by the camera--or perhaps they were just told to hold onto anything, like the chair, or their clothing, or whatever.  These girls chose to hold their own hands, each one of them a Mona Lisa.  The emotions of these young people seem staggering to me, their bodies communicating the realization of the very hard and impossible end to minor crimes committed as a function of desperation.  

San Quentin Prison, Female Impersonators, 1920's

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Another series sculpted out of the collection of San Quentin Prison photographs at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley--all are ca, 1925-1935.

 

San Quentin Prison Photographs: Baseball, 1920's

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From the collections of University of California, Berkeley, the Bancroft Library:  "Views of San Quentin Prison and Events, ca. 1925-1935".

All images are expandable.

"China, Glass, Auction & Negro Sales": Photography of the Sherman Atlanta Campaign, 1864.

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1535

Atlanta, Georgia.  Whitehall Street:  " China, Glass, Auction & Negro Sales." 1864. Photo by George N. Gardner.

The first name people associate with photography and the American Civil War is Matthew Brady.  Brady did of course come up with the idea for photographically documenting the conflict and made images of his own, but the truth of the matter is that he had a lot of help making his record--other great names from the early period of American photography were employed by him, sent out into the field to record what they saw.  Alexander Gardner, Timothy Sullivan, James Gardner, William Pywell and eighteen others recorded the great events in addition to Brady, though for the most part it was Brady's name on the finished work.

One of these men was George Gardner (1819-1902), who at one point owned his own studio in Oswego, New York in 1847, working for himself until he joined the Brady force in 1861.  He left Brady in 1863, but he didn't leave the war, becoming an official photographer for the United States Army, Chief Engineer's Office and joining General William T. Sherman and the  Military Department of the Mississippi in 1864, at which point he documented Sherman's Atlanta Campaign.  (One of the results of this effort was his 61-photograph work, Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign (1), published in a sumptuous leather bind in 1866, a big, heavy work with original albumen photographs.)  The images below, however, were not published in this work--all 61 images can be view here, at the collections of the Hargrett Library at the University of Georgia.

Detail of the first image, above--the three other businesses that I can identify are tobacconists of one form or another.  It looks like a Union private is sitting quietly (reading?)  in front of the auction house, his rifle leaning against the wall.  There were a lot of people going into this place, if grime on the doorway is a testament to a legacy of busy-ness. 

I wonder if you were coming here as a slave, without the ability to read or distinguish any sort of written character, I wonder what you would think of those two enormous "8" characters painted on the side of the building.  That symbol is an old one for infinity, continuing--I wonder how many cultures would have used that line as its own?

Atlanta, Georgia, 1864.

The only reason that the private in the photograph above is captured so clearly is that he was probably reading, which means he was sitting still for the minute or so that it would take to make the exposure.  That's what gives this image above its qualities of clarity and ghostliness--there are as many suggestions of people as there are imaged folks in this photo.  What we see plainly are the men sitting on the business stoops--look more closely and you'll see many more moving along the sidewalk, the briefest bits of them being captured by the long exposure. (There is just a hint of someone leaning against the gas light fixture in the foreground.)

Nashville, Tennessee.  1864

 

Atlanta, Georgia.  View on Marietta Street, 1864.

 Detail:

Atlanta, Georgia.  1864. "Soldiers on boxcars at the depot."  There was no date that I could find offhand on this image, so I don't know if the soldiers were coming, or going, or already there and just trying to catch a breeze on top of the cars. It had to be after the end of the campaign, after Atlanta's mayor James Calhoun surrendered the city following  the entry of Henry Slocum's XX Corps on 2 September 1864, and sufficiently after that for the men to climb on top of the boxcar and not get fried by a scorching Georgia late summer sun.  They certainly weren't busy pulling up the rails like they did in so many other locations in the city and vicinity, ensuring a de-mobilization of what had to this point been a primary center for Confederate munitions supply and manufacture. 

 Detail:

 

Notes:

1.  The full title of the book is Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign, Embracing Scenes of the Occupation of Nashville, the Great Battles around Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain, the Campaign of Atlanta, March to the Sea, and the Great Raid through the Carolinas.

Picturing Naive-Disturbia: the Spectacular Loneliness of Australian Mug Shots

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These photographic mug shots from Sydney police records (1912-1930) are nothing short of spectacular.  Intended as informal portraits of the convict in a sort-of relaxed setting, a second portrait was included to show the person as they might look on the street.  The portraits are fantastically full of life; but the second images, the informal full-lengths, are extremely disturbing, as in a naive-disturbia:  there's usually some sort of darkness with an awkward distance between the subject and the little else that is in the shot (cell door, chair, stain on the floor, guard), a loneliness, a location of uncomfortable space.  It looks as though there are all sorts of images-within-images here, photographs readymade for exploration.

For a thorough discussion of the series see the excellent article "Public eye, private eye: Sydney police mug shots, 1912-1930", by Peter Doyle, in  Scan Journal (vol 2 number 3 December 2005)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then there are photos like this, below, where the annotations become part of the art of the image:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tree Rings of Soldiers' Uniforms, 1918

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Aside from the strong impact that this 1918 image [the original available at our blog bookstore, here] makes, the enormous mounds of clothing of captured German solders that were routinely handled as part of their processing, it struck a deeper chord to an older image still (that we'll see below).  The photograph seems threatening to me, even though the action taking place in it wasn't, it was mundane--the men, who I believe are German POW's, are processing the clothing for disinfection and cleaning.  But the size of the mound reminds us of the magnitude of the numbers of the dozens of millions who were killed during WWI, as well as the millions who were taken prisoner.  What remains to be said about this image is how often that pile of clothing was replaced:  is it a monthly, or weekly, or daily pile?  My guess is that it was more daily than anything else, if for no other reason than there is an enormous oil lamp in the background of the photo, suggesting that the process went on all day and into the night.  My initial reaction is that this pile was replicated often during any given month....

 

And the image it reminds me of are those made of the enormous mounds of buffalo hides, piles readied for shipment away from the Plains by rail. 

I am in no way suggesting that the prisoner were skinned like the buffalo, not in any way.  But they do bear a resemblance in the way that thousands of men or buffalo could be represented in such a compact space, flattened husks of the living thing, gross representations of big numbers. 

German Military Medical Retreat, Coastal Poland, 1915

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This image, from the 22 Juli 1915 issue of the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig) shows a collection of German soldiers that were treated at a medical aidstation.  The woman in white is the German crown princess, accompanied by her four navy-uniform-clad sons, are adrift in a sea of wounded and recovering soldiers who I guess were given leave from the war, celebrating their survival at the old spa and vacation spot Ostseebad, in Zoppot (Sopot, Poland).  (The issue may be purchased at our blog bookstore.)

And the detail:

And another:

A Million Miles of Barbed Wire? (1918)

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 The following photos were found in my small collection of World War I news photo service images, all of which were made in 1918.  They show the preparation of barbed wire entanglements--these were devilish things, made to grab a soldier and suck them in into a deeper hold when resisted, like a sort of sharp, metallic quicksand.  Since there were something like 12-25,000 miles of trenches dug during WWI, I think that it might be a safe bet to say that there were a million miles of barbed wire fencing laid down--that would be equal to about 75 feet of wiring for every soldier who served, or about 200 feet for every person killed. Given the tactics, the trenches, the barbed wire, the machine guns, the gas, and so on, it is no wonder that there was very little advancement over battlefields that stretched for miles and involved hundreds of thousands of troops, costing (sometimes) hundreds of thousands of casualties.  It would have been just insane-nasty to have to charge through fields of this stuff while being bombed and shot at by people in holes.  (All three original photos are available at our blog bookstore.)

No gloves, here, not for the soldier weaving the wire or for the spinner in the background:

I notice that in this photograph the only person wearing gloves is the lead model, front-and-center:

Here's the support staff assembling the

Barbed Wire Cutting Device on the Mall, 1918.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1394

"Will Cut its Way Through Hun Entanglements" reads the header to the caption for this new photo service war photo from the Central News Photo Service, published nearly at the end of 1918, just a few months before the end of the war. The inventor, John E. Logan, was demonstrating his invention "before senators and representatives of Congress" on a "miniature tank wire entanglement".  The "entanglement" wire was much nastier than what you'd think of as the "barbed wire" of today--not concertina wire, but something small and nasty that was meant to catch soldiers, to pin them more deeply in the wire like a sharp metallic quicksand, stopping their advance and making them meat bait for machine gunners and everyone else. 

Logan attracted a fair size crowd for his demonstration in the vicinity of the Capitol.  His machine seemed to work well, too, cutting through 72 strands of wire in about a half minute.  I'm not sure how many of these machines were produced (can't find anything on them offhand)  but there would've been a need for a great number of them, given that since there was something like 12-25,000 miles of trenches dug during the war that there must've been millions of miles of barbed wire produced.  (That's an off-hand guess, but it probably isn't horribly wrong.)

(The original photo is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.)

Cold and Understatement on the Western Front, 1916

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1392

The caption stamped on the back of the news photo service agency photograph (from the Western Newspaper Union) said that the bitter cold encountered by these Canadian soldiers on the Western Front in the winter of 1916 "was one of many difficulties encountered by the soldiers".  "Great hardships have been caused by the frigid weather in this region" continues the caption.  Indeed.  Even for Canadians this was a cold winter, though not so cold that the Canadian trooper in the foreground stopped to put on his gloves to remove the ice from the water trough. These soldiers may have been cavalry, as there is a horse-like medallion on the front of their lids. (This photo is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.)

Evidently the role of the cavalry in the BEF along the Western Front is an under-appreciated thing, or misunderstood, at least.  I'm not sure how they influenced the outcome of this stagnant section of the war, where the line of battle remained essentially unchanged throughout the duration of the war.  Millions of troops were deeply entrenched over hundreds of miles of battlefront, wailing away at one another with massive artillery barrages, countless machine gun nests, and then eventually tanks, planes and poison gas.  Back in February 1916 there weather was so tough and frigid that the battle of Verdun was postponed a bit, waiting for less intense weather conditions.  Dozens of millions of artillery shells and  billions of bullets later, in 1918, there was little change in the positions of the armies, except of course for the millions of casualties. 

 

Abe Lincoln in June, 1860

JF Ptak Science Books   Post  1391

Abe Lincoln, 1860.  I don't know how he held everything together.  He was a master tactician, held conflicting and opposing thoughts in his mind and in his cabinet, was incredibly shrewd, and had a deep insight into the future.  He was still, even into 1862, a mocked character, even by his closest associates.  And generals--G.B. McClellan, for example, the general who never should have been actually in charge of an army outside of training it, never should've been in the field, never should have been given the opportunity to work more for the opposition than for the Union, saw Lincoln as a buffoon, a nuisance in his own supra-egotistical path to national office.  Lincoln not only survives all of this, but conquers .  I would love to see a two-person play of Lincoln at chess, from the point of view of the chess pieces. 

I'm posting this as I am getting ready for a Civil War-in-the-newspapers, day-by-day, as we approach the 150th anniversary of what was the great defining moment in the history of the United States. (This image is offered for sale at our blog bookstore.)

THis 8.5x6.5 inch image was made in 1881 by George .B Ayres from the original glass negative made by Alexander Hesler's photograph of Lincoln at Springfield, Illinois, 3 June 1860.  (Ayres had come into possession of Hesler's studio and negatives after Hesler's death.)

And the detail:

And deeper: