Sitting in SPLIT PEA SOUP

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Tattered and Lost volumes 1 to 7 available at Amazon.

Is that the NEW YEAR I HEAR KNOCKING?

Sometimes a handshake is enough, A KISS TOO FAR

This week's Sepia Saturday is about shaking hands. I don't have any photos that I can think of that have people shaking hands, but I do have a sort of story.

But first, my contribution for this week.


Click on image to see it larger.


I'm wondering if these ladies might have preferred just a handshake instead of what appears to be big smacks on the lips. Of course, the big smacks aren't real, just someone doing some hand tinting to the photo. I love how they're all smeared.

I remember an old woman in line at the Hollywood post office that wore lipstick like this. She looked as if she'd put the bright red lipstick on and then run her hand across her face because the lipstick was smeared diagonally from nose to chin. She looked like an old silent screen actress who should have moved back to the farm when she had the chance. Seeing her convinced me Hollywood was not a town to grow old in.

Messy kisses aside, often even a handshake can be too familiar.

When I was very young my family lived on Midway Island for a year. When a plane landed with someone important on board the residents would go down to the airport to take a look. A particular high ranking government official came through following a trip to Japan. I was a cute curly headed blonde kid and this government official handed me a Japanese yen. I grabbed that money and when he tried to take it back I said, "Mine!" There's actual 8 mm movie footage of me giving him a dirty look as I clutched that bill to my chest. My mother was embarrassed. The official laughed. Really the only interesting part of this story is that this official later went on to create quite a mess for himself by scamming people over money. I'm thinking I was a good judge of character even at that age. Alas I have no idea what became of that yen note. And I won't reveal the name of the high ranking government official…but if it was today you could just pick one out of the hat and be right.

More FACE WRECKS

Sometimes hand tinting a photo, even by a "professional," can go amazingly bad. People can be turned into jaundiced alien beings. It's not just the aging of the photo that causes this, it's a lack of understanding of color. I try to imagine what the family thought when they saw this. "Oh sure, really…fine…we'll take it." And they kept smiling.


Click on image to see it larger.

To see another post of a face wreck click here.

This is my submission for Sepia Saturday this week. I am not on theme, but I got the colors right.

FACE wrecks

One of my favorite sites to visit is Cake Wrecks. I love seeing really bad cakes get called out in public. There's something glorious about the typos, the color combinations, the general ugliness and stupidity of the cakes. So I think of the hand tinting of this photo as the vernacular photography version of cake wrecks.

A "professional" was given the job to take a black and white portrait and make it more life like. Ummmm…I'm guessing the entire family had jaundice.


Click on image to see it larger for diagnosis purposes only.

DERANGED rabbit

I've had a death in my family and I'm longing for happier times. This little snow bunny makes me smile.


Click on image to see it larger.

When you CAN'T SEE THE FOREST for the man

I don't find pristine tintypes. I find tintypes that are bent, and jagged, and scuffed. But somehow the rosy cheeks always manage to come through the turmoil of 100+ years. This particular image has more damage than you can imagine. Right through the horizontal middle it's severely bent. I'm actually surprised it scanned as nicely as it did.

So would you call the scratches patina? In this case patina brings down the photos value which means it's cheap enough for me to buy.

My imaginings say this fellow had this shot taken in San Francisco and that he was of Italian descent. The truth is, I have no idea. He could be a pool hustler from Poughkeepsie. Or perhaps he was in a tour group of famous faces and his job was to pretend to be Bat Masterson. Heck, almost all guys back then seem to have looked like Bat Masterson. That's the problem with these old images. Everyone looks like a cardboard cut-out.

So I give you "Cardboard Cut-Out of Man With Trees."

The YOUNG GIRL IN THE BONNET

This is the last of the hand tinted photos. I found this little scrap of paper mixed in a box of snapshots at an antique store. Not regular photo paper; in fact I really don't know what this was printed on, but it shows no dot pattern so it's not a halftone.

Though the paper is damaged, the image is surprisingly intact. All the brush strokes can be seen under my loop, no damage to the little girls face. She most certainly needed rescued from the box before greasy fingers were run across her rosy cheeks.

YOUNG LOVE in pink

I really don't know about this shot. Brother and sister? Boyfriend and girlfriend? It comes from the Kentucky STRANGEST PHOTO ALBUM I Ever Bought. It's a sweet picture or is it?

Pretty in pink.

Tomorrow will be the final hand tinted photo.

Alas, no time to participate in Sepia Saturday this weekend. I simply don't have the bandwidth required to go around and make comments on other posts. Perhaps next week.

Coy and LIGHTLY TINTED

This lovely young lady was in a collection of photos that belonged to my friend Burt. There's no information about her, and as you can see one of the photos is in focus, the other not so much.

The hand tinting is much better than the others I have shown this week. I think the first one would have looked nice in a frame on her true loves dresser. Okay, the skin tone is a wee bit on the pancake makeup side...downright Martian looking, but the cheeks and eyes are nice. So two out of three galactic points.

Click on either image to see it larger.

ANOTHER FRIEND of Juanita or Charles

Another image from THE STRANGEST PHOTO ALBUM I Ever Bought. I think that about says it all. Someone really went to town with their colors on this one, including the dress.

FRIEND of Juanita or Charles?

If you've been following this site since earlier this year you might remember the odd photo album I featured that belonged to Chas. E. Thomas from Kentucky. I called it THE STRANGEST PHOTO ALBUM I Ever Bought. If you haven't seen it you might want to go back in time and check out the series of posts that featured one of his wives, Juanita.

Amongst all the duplicate shots of Juanita, her daughter, her former husband, etc. were some photobooth shots that had been hand tinted. This is one of them.

There's no information as to who this woman is. It's all a mystery. Who is she and who applied the color? With the oddness of the album there are a lot of stories that could probably be told about this woman.

The Gray family got maybe TOO MUCH SUN

I'm calling them the Gray family, though their name is something like Seabcros. They were family relations in some manner of the Kallman family. I just can't figure out the spelling of the name. And try to imagine this "album" which is nothing more than black paper tied together with all photos stapled into the "book." Yes, I said stapled. You can see the staples in the shot below.

For my purpose they are the Gray family. The family that went to the beach and stayed out too long the day before they were getting the family portrait taken.

Another fine example of hand tinting. You can see yesterday's example here.

Click on image to see it larger.

I think you'll agree with me that this is some truly fine fine work. A portrait just calling out from the other side...

HAND TINTED photographs

If you follow my other blog, Tattered and Lost Ephemera, you'll know I've been focusing on nighttime postcard images. I bought a book called Postcards of the Night: Views of American Cities which goes into some detail about how black and white photos shot during the day were often used for old postcards showing nighttime city scenes. A lot of photo manipulation was done to create the images, far more than I'd expected.

This got me thinking about hand tinted photos and what I have in my collection. Some of the tinting was done by professionals, but on the whole I believe most of it was done by regular folks hoping to enhance their photos, not always successful.

Over the next several days I'll be posting images of varying success. I'll leave it to you to determine on how well the job was done.

I have no information about this young lady. I do have two black and white photobooth shots of her taken when she was younger. I'm wondering if she did the hand tinting on this photo, making sure her striped skirt reflected what it looked like in real life. A slight blush to the cheeks, a blue hair ribbon peeking over the top of her "yellow" hair, and the decorative "needle work" on the front of her blouse. Interestingly, no color was added to her eyes.

Click on image to see it larger.

To see the postcard images click here, here, here, and here with more to come this week.

Just a little BLUSH IN THE SKY

I love this photograph. It was given to me by my best friend. She gave me a stack of photos that she'd bought many years ago at a flea market. She finally decided maybe she'd better get them out of her house before circumstances in the future had her kids sorting through her belongs saying "Do you know these people? Are we related to these people?" So now they're all settled in with all the people I've found.

A lot of people might look at this shot and just think it's a mess, but I think it's lovely. The choice made to hand tint the sky and buildings is interesting. The woman is left colorless, except for a small amount of the brown on her neck. Because of this it almost has an appearance of a collage. It's as if she's simply been cut-out and stuck in the midst of the snowy park. There's a painterly feeling to it. And knowing someone labored over this, made specific choices as to where to use color, makes it even more special because it really is one of a kind. There isn't another one in existence just like it even if many prints were made from the negative.

Today tinting of black and white photos can be easily done in Photoshop, but it often loses the spontaneity that real hand tinting created. There was a delightful messiness that often happened. And if you screwed up, so be it, there was no way to delete and try again on the same print. To read a little about the history of hand tinting click here.