“Sunday Afternoon on Kolín Island,” Czech Republic, 1922, by Joseph Sudek, via Museum of Photographic Arts Commons on flickr.
Category: culture and history
Life in gardens: natural light
Elizabeth and Marilyn Watson, probably in the Berkeley, California, area, 1921, by Dorothea Lange, via Museum of Photographic Arts Commons on flickr (all photos here).
Above, Marilyn Watson; in both photos, the sisters seem to be under a grape arbor. Below, they are with their mother, May V. Landis Watson, still outdoors, I believe.
In 1921, Lange was 26 years old and running her own portrait studio in Berkeley. She had many well-to-do clients, as the Watsons appear to be. Ten years later, she would begin the work that made her famous: capturing the faces of the Great Depression and of the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans.
There’s a little clip from a PBS documentary on Lange here. It shows a number of her early photographs.
Vintage landscape: Lacock Abbey
“Lady Elisabeth’s Rose Garden, Lacock [Abbey], England,” early 1840s, by William Henry Fox Talbot, via Museum of Photographic Arts Commons on flickr (both photos).
Lady Elizabeth Fox-Strangways Feilding was the photographer’s mother.
Talbot was one of the early fathers of photography. He developed the paper negative and the process of permanently fixing photos on chemically treated paper.
This is the body of light. . . .
— Ronald Johnson, from “BEAM 30: The Garden“
Life in gardens: wildflowers
Children costumed as flowers or insects for an event of the Wild Flower Preservation Society, Illinois Chapter, probably in a Chicago park, ca. 1920, hand-colored glass lantern slides by an unknown photographer, via The Field Museum Library Commons on flickr (all images here).
The Wild Flower Preservation Society of America was founded in 1902 with money given to the New York Botanical Garden by Olivia E. and Caroline Phelps Stokes. The funds were to be used for the protection of native plants.
The Society dissolved in 1933, but much of its work was taken up by the Garden Club of America and by another Wild Flower Preservation Society, founded in 1925 in Washington, D.C. (which seems no longer to exist).
Above and below: Mayapples.
Above: a bee.
Click here to see several more of the slides.
Life in gardens: Galveston, Texas
Two women playing badminton or lawn tennis while others look on, “The Oaks,” Galveston,Texas, ca. 1900, via Texas State Archives Commons on flickr.
enclos*ure 