Category: working in the garden

Les Mées, France

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Women resting after working in a garden or vineyard, Les Mées, Basses-Alpes, France, April 13, 1916, by Georges Chevalier, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Départment of Hauts-de-Seine.

I love their hats. Les Mées is in Haute or upper Provence.  The area — very dry and hot — is one of the least densely populated in France.

This autochrome is one of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and pacifist, between 1909 and 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.

*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. Also, the above photo (A 7 954) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.

Black River Falls, Wisconsin

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“Individual beds at nursery. Black River Falls project, Wisconsin,” June 1937, by Russell Lee, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

In the early summer of 1937, Lee took a number of photos around the community of Black River Falls. Most were related to a land use project of the U.S. Resettlement Administration, for which he was a photographer.

The principal employment in Black River Falls, since its founding in 1839, was logging and sawmills. However, many of the people Lee photographed there were farming cut-over areas.

Today, the town is probably best known as the subject of the 1973 book (and 1999 film) Wisconsin Death Trip. 

Victory rabbits

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“The home garden of Clifford[,] Bernard[,] and Elizabeth Bridges who use the fertilizer from the Rabbitry for their gardens.” Photo taken in Oregon, ca. between 1915 and 1918, via 4-H Photograph Collection, OSU Special Collections & Archives Commons on flickr.

The children are members of a local 4-H club, making a WWI victory garden. I think this is the Portland home (and children) of W.R. and Elizabeth Bridges. W.R. was a proofreader for The Oregonian.

Click on “via” above for a larger view of the image.

Upper Hutt, Wellington

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“Mrs B Captain, Ekins and garden, Savage Crescent,” Upper Hutt, New Zealand, ca. early to mid 20th c., by J.W. Chapman-Taylor, via Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa.

I wonder if the wooden crates stacked up on the left indicate that this was a market garden, which were common in the Hutt Valley until the 1940s.

You can click on the picture to enlarge it (or click here and then on the image to zoom in even more).

Chapman-Taylor was an important New Zealand domestic architect, builder, furniture designer, and photographer who lived in the Valley in the mid 1930s.