• DOWNLOAD | DEPECHE MODE “Photographic” (Rex the Dog Dubb Mix) Remixes: 81-04, 2004
I found this print, and five others just like it, at the Brooklyn Flea last weekend while rummaging through a box of vintage photographs. Each photo depicts what appears to be a different window display — selling refrigerators, dishwashers, lamps, or in this case, electric water heaters — and, according to their dated ink stamps, the collection was taken between 1956 and 1963 for the Philadelphia Electric Company. This image was the first to catch my eye: I loved the grainy black-and-white texture, the painstakingly hand-drawn type, and the Mondrian-styled painting in the background — which comes, seemingly, from nowhere.
I’m writing about these photos because they somehow articulate the relationship between mid-century aesthetics and the culture that adopted them with endearing clarity. But as a writer, I’m also inevitably piqued by the language of this period, and the implications of its unpretentiousness. These were a people so unfazed by hyperbole, for example, that the word ECONOMICAL felt like a complete pitch in itself. In another image, the Philadelphia Electric Company reflects the modesty of its customer by humbly gloating over the “adequate” food storage their refrigerator provides. A third display, for table lamps, rejects notions of luxury for the decidedly pragmatic claim that your home will have BETTER LIGHT!
This was, of course, in the B.C. Era — before Cribs.
The visuals are clean and uncomplicated, and the pitch follows suit; the word “economical,” it seems, also applied to the unhyped application of message and medium. I want to believe that, on some level, this still works. But I feel like, one day, it will seem amazing to own evidence that it ever worked at all.
Almost ten years ago, my friend Bob started a project he called Never Ending Polaroid, in which he coordinated a series of almost 600 polaroids featuring a person holding a polaroid of the person holding the previous polaroid of the person holding the previous polaroid. And so on. I linked to this once before, but this morning’s addition felt like a good excuse for a revisit: Meet Kenneth from 30 Rock, back in the day. (The takeaway: We’re all getting old, fast.) The entire collection, still in progress, is on Flickr.
In 1947, the New Yorker ran an article about Harry Dubin and his family — because they owned a television set. Man, developing new content was so easy back then.
Anyway, he was actually far more interesting than that article would let on. During the 1940s — as a form of bonding recreation, I suppose — Dubin and his son created a series of images for a family photo album they called “Dubin at Work”:
It was such an interesting collection. Each of the pictures depicted a man in uniform intently doing his job, whether it was a street sweeper, gas station attendant, or hansom cab driver. When I looked at them twice, I realized something: all of them were Harry!
Harry explained that all of them were taken by his son Ronald, who was then a teenager, after Harry managed to convince each worker to change clothes with him in an alley and let Harry do his job for a few minutes so the picture could be taken.
In other words, there was actually a time in New York City when people would agree to walk into an alley with a total stranger and trade clothes with him for what they believed was nothing more than a father-son hobby. (I wanna live in that New York.) New photos are currently being scanned and uploaded here.
Photography books became more of a luxury item than ever in 2009, but Dan Winters’ Periodical Photographs is the one I coveted most. Despite being taken in 1998, this portrait of Fred Rogers is probably the best celebrity portrait I saw this year, and the rest of the book follows suit; for many of Winter’s subjects, it’s a welcome reprieve from vanity to nonentity. More samples from the book are here, courtesy of the New Yorker.
