Voici le Boulevard du Temple à Paris, 1838.
This photograph always fascinates me. According to Wikipedia it contains the earliest reliably dated images of human beings - the man having his boots cleaned at the lower left, and, a bit fuzzier, the cleaner at work. (Here’s a bigger version.)
There’s nothing else in the street, because the exposure time (about 10 minutes!) was too long to catch pedestrians or street traffic moving at normal speed. The place is a ghost town. And it seems that getting your boots cleaned properly takes quite a while!
‘The first artificially-created human clones date back to the 1860s. Clever photographers, ever on the watch for new ideas to boost business, developed several techniques to duplicate people — causing them to appear twice in the same photograph. Special plate-holders and rotating partial lens caps were among the devices used to expose half of the negative at a time. After the first exposure, the subject of the photograph would quickly move into a different position so the second half of the picture could be made.’
- The American Museum of Photography
Summertime #3
Kôyô Kageyama: «Mogas in beach pyjama fashion», 1928
(via wine-loving-vagabond)
Soyouthinkyoucansee
A woman Sambourne snobbishly describes as a “shop girl” strolls down Kensington Church Street engrossed in a book. 1906.
Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910) was a cartoonist for Punch. He used photography as a working tool when doing his illustrations. He also photographed other subjects, primarily for his own use and pleasure.
What Sambourne captures in his street photography, and why his pictures are of interest to historians of fashion, is a certain casual look all the young women in them have, which is quite different from the formal image of Edwardian fashion one sees in many textbooks and costume dramas.
This cabinet card of late 1880s shows a mother with her son and their dog.
