Found Photographs

Lately I've been occupying my time with a slightly obsessive cataloguing of found photographs.  View the totality my squandered hours at the Archaic Archetypes tumblr blog, which I'm still posting to.  Otherwise here are my favorites, plus commentary.

Also, these are tiny.  If you want to view them larger, or actually want a high-res copy of the picture for your own uses, go to Archaic Archetypes and request one.

Train!

Because my grandpa is one of those people who has either no desire or no ability to relate to actual human people, he instead cultivates deep and lasting relationships with things.  The result is boxes of pictures of people that have been long dead, some for for over a century, and nobody has any idea who they are.  The bulk of these pictures are those.

 It's a dead baby.  What can you say about a dead baby?  Other than, you know, a dead baby joke.

 

This one is just so simple and clean.  A man, a boat.  Awesome.

My heart is captured by 1) the sublime sun-filtered haze 2) the dapper gentleman at the gate.

Apparently my great grandmother ran and/or taught at a sewing school?  The annotations on the back are cryptic.  I think I like it more for the revelation that my great-grandmother actually did stuff.

Initially this picture made it's way into my "Awesome" pile because of the dainty way the Reverend is eating his watermelon among the savages (lady in the back excluded).  But then I realized that they're eating at my dining room table.

The only way to make a selfie classy is to take it almost a century ago.