Biergarten Shenanigans!

View larger on black

View larger on black

Got a heavy week ahead? Commit these images to your memory and refer to them as often as you can - a room full of people with hats, cigarettes and beer breath could be in your future!

Ducks. Broken Umbrella. Trash.

View larger on black

This slide is so different to the others. I wish someone would paint this.

Joints cut to customers requirements.

View larger on black

Not unlike a picture I took myself in the soulless den-of-iniquity Las Vegas:

View raw on black

Cuts of meat proves to be fascinating.

Here comes the sun!

View larger on black

We've had a flood in our basement over the weekend, and we've finally gone dry tonight! Happy Summer Solstice. I think this shot deserves dust removal. Hold for an update:

View larger on black

I don't usually like to remove dust, but this one needed it. Don't you agree? Ahhh. <satisfied sigh>

Colourful women.

Of course, it's not all about time travel - a good photo has character, loads of it. Today's post is all about the great fleeting moment, and the women caught unawares.
In ascending order of "good-time gals":

Be ignored on black

She is seriously into her nails. What a great shot though, right? Totally sniped, you know if she looked up and saw this photo being taken, her eyes would have rolled Rembrandt white and the sneer would have seared right through this poor sap's lens. Deadly!

View larger on black

What a scene! Where are you going, Señora Rioja? Did you just buy something embarrassing at the Farmacia Plemono? Or are you nervous about your appointment at the Clinica Dental? But let's give her a break - not a soul in the shot? An area a little rough around the edges? Just a lady living her life and someone who took her picture. She looks tense, guarded - and who wouldn't be in those circumstances? Other than a lumberjack, and I don't think she's off to cut down some pines.

Be even more uncomfortable on black

I love the energy in this one! The OMGness! "Let's just get through this awful meal without having to watch Alvin slop Stove-Top into his already overflowing polyester pocket". Janet and Janice Ribbon (the tennis sisters) have the drive and ambition to survive another Thanksgiving. You know it.

Taking the spotlight on black

Who's the greatest? Who's the most confident and comfortable character in the shot? This one has it all: lots of colour, lots of action, lots of character! Lady Light Blue Lei's the lady I want to be someday! (and repeat)

Slides with addresses.

A special thank you to Boing Boing for directing so many new eyeballs to the Archive yesterday!

Every now and then I'll stumble on a slide with an address on it, (see the episodes about 8626 Fauntleroy, Seattle and Freeman Street, Grimsby) and up until this one there's a definite familiarity to the place then and now. So let's stop and smell the gorgeous Kodachrome roses at 630 Victory Blvd, Staten Island, September 1979.

View larger on black

This is full use of the film, flowers like this just snap and pop off the slide. And what a great looking house! Or many houses - hard to tell. But 630 Victory Blvd. doesn't look anything like this now:


View Larger Map

It reminds me of when my husband and I drove to his childhood neighbourhood only to find every house had been razed to the ground - the driveways and streets were still there, but not a single house. It was creepy. But if you stroll up and down Victory Blvd. and then fly over it (the internet gives you wings!) you'll see that there's a house tucked behind these apartment buildings. Is that this lovely structure? I hope it still stands, the roses are amazing. Is that where Marshall S. Kirk DPM practices his podiatry? Do his patients get to gaze at these flowers as he scrapes corns off their heels?

I hope so! But since I've embedded the unpleasant image of corns, warts and general gore of the feet into your imaginations, I think I owe it to you to fill your eyes with some more pretty pretty flowers, so here you go my pretty pretty:

View larger on black

Nice right? Lovely. But not quite the vintage that turns me on. Let's fly off to Bakewell, Derbyshire, England in June 1961:

View larger on black

Oh yeah... that's the stuff! Sizzle! Say it again. Sizzle. Now it's next to impossible to pinpoint where this photo was taken, but investigating the area (slide says "independence" Bakewell, Debys.), I find nearly everything is named "Haddon" in the area, which is close to my surname but not close enough to demand the keys. There is a very good rose garden at Haddon Hall, which could definitely maybe be where this was taken.

See UGArdener's Haddon Hall set on Flickr

Hey, maybe it is maybe it isn't. But don't you feel great for wandering around this English country garden? Hells yeah! High five for flowers!

Kerrville or Sioux Falls? 1956 Centennial Parade.

Let's watch the parade first:

Look at all those great businesses - Gridley Martz Insurance, Don's Drive-In Liquor, Vandel Furniture, Ethel's All Girl Bar and Lounge (bar AND lounge? So much drinking going on!). Keep going down the street, Canton Chow Mein Cafe, Ace Variety, Sansa's Cafe, Maytag District Store - lots and lots of easy leads to pinpoint where the parade happened, right? Wrong! I have not been able to find evidence of any of these businesses! Seriously - no one cared to remember and record Ethel's? That's ridiculous.

So the flags led me on a red herring, I thought this was Texas. I did find this remarkably similar footage of another centennial parade that happened in Kerrville:



Looks like we're on the right track, right? I don't think so... something isn't right, and not one of the floats are the same. The closest thing to a solid lead was the miniature horses in the last frame, the wagon has a banner from "Zip Feed Mills" which was a definite hit for Sioux Falls, SD, which was also celebrating it's centennial that year. We're on to something...

The Zip Feed Mill itself is an interesting structure, its construction started the year of this parade and it was the tallest occupiable structure until it became notorious in 2005 when its demolition ended up as a spectacular failed implosion:



Searching for a little more evidence, one more good lead, I found this picture of John Morrell's float:

 That nails it! Those are definitely the girls in the first slide. This is Sioux Falls, 1956.
 Research is fun, kids!

Ban-fa-fa.

View larger on black

I do get a little excited every time I come across scenes from the Canadian Rockies, Banff through Jasper (and especially Jasper - one of my "soul quenching" places). This is a lovely and vibrant shot of Banff. It's very reminiscent of one of my favourite Fred Herzog photos of Banff:

Courtesy of the Equinox Gallery

The author of that photo certainly had some interesting adventures, such as transporting crisply ironed clothes and keeping interested bears away from those clothes.

Grrrr! Give me your shirts!

And also when they passed into B.C. and the northern lights happened during the day:

View larger on black

Magic! I love flaws.What a great road-trip that must have been!

Sweet Fort.

View larger on black

Boys not allowed (but girly-boys ok)! How sweet is this rock fort with a view? Must have been built by wicked cool kids - or wicked cool hobos. Not sure where this is, but it's definitetly Kodachrome between May 1952 - and Aug 1955.

They're coming!

The archive is practically doubling over the next few days, so I've gone out and found a lovely little bookcase to house everything in one place.

Ahhh much better.

There are more arriving every day, but let's get started with some delicious high colour numbers, and why not dive right in with gnomes, like this confused little boy did:

View larger on black

 

This trip to the gnome store in July 1971 changed his life forever... I suspect.

View larger on black

WAFFLES! SHOOTING! I'll do a little research on this one, it's american, but I don't know where. Pipe up if you can identify this festive street.

View larger on black

 

Definitely Canada, it's rare for me to like shots like this - nature close-ups don't usually drive me wild, though they sit far above posed children's shots and wedding photos (and I think the very bottom of the barrel are those black and white ones with one thing colourised - blech!) on the love-hate scale. This however is pretty stunning and again, I think my scanner is failing to translate the real hues on the slide - all the same, it's still pretty nice. Aww, maple leaves in October, 1960.

One more? Ok. How about the lady that shot a rainbow from her ass?

View larger on black

Once it slowly emerged from her bum, she had to step aside to show the more intense, fresh part of the rainbow. Now every time you see a rainbow, think of this lovely lady, hiking up her skirt, straining to squeeze out another beautiful arc of colour. Just for you.

Stay tuned for... Parades! Mountains! Natives! Bears! Picnics! More!

That's me on the column.

View larger on black

I'm permanently perched at the mailbox for what will amount to more than 2000 new slides for the collection! So here I am with a warmed-up scanner and some tea just dyin' to get scanning. Soon, I hope. In the meantime, here's another view of Fountain Square, Cincinnati. Love the cars.