Front garden and steps, probably Finland, ca. 1900, by Hugo Simberg, via Finnish National Gallery on flickr (under CC license).
So much activity and anticipation in this shadowy old photo: the three women on the top left are waiting for the appearance of someone at the door. Below them, a toddler has been left to perch a little precariously on the steps. On the right, a woman with a very large hat and a little girl pose for the camera. Vines everywhere.
(There’s a larger view here.)
Front of the Robert Tait House, Camden, Alabama, 1936, by Alex Bush for an Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (all three photos).
The house was built for Robert Tait in 1855. It still stands.
“Kenneth Hall gives daughter Peggy a shower with garden hose in front of their [Tennessee Valley Authority] defense home, Sheffield, Alabama,” 1942, Arthur Rothstein, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Dorothy and Shirley Hick playing with a sprinkler in their back garden, Northcote, Melbourne, Australia, 1949, by Emily Hick, via Museums Victoria Collections (under CC license).
The photo was archived as part of Melbourne’s Biggest Family Album in 2006.
Dorothy remembers on hot days they would put the sprinkler on and play, as there were no swimming pools. They wore “horrible knitted woollen bathers, they soaked up the water and got heavy and baggy.” The ladder against the tree was to pick apricots “which were so ripe and juicy the juice would run down your chin.”
— Museums Victoria online catalogue
You can click on the image for a better view.
The front porch of an inn* on the Avala road, Belgrade area, Serbia, April 1913, by
Auguste Léon, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine (all three images here).
These autochromes are three of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker who was committed to the ideal of universal peace and believed that “knowledge of foreign cultures encourages respect and peaceful relations between nations.”† He was also acutely aware that the 20th century was going to bring rapid material change to the world.
Accordingly, from 1909 to 1931, Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to fifty countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.’”†† The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.
*On the first image above it is called an auberge (inn), on the others, it is called a maison (house).
†Collections Albert Kahn website. Also, the above photos (A 1 798, A 1 800, A 69 405 X) are © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.
††Words of Albert Kahn, 1912.
enclos*ure 