Tag: porch

Poppies, Sweden

Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment


A young woman and two little girls in front of a row of double poppies, Gagnef, Sweden, August 1910, by Auguste Léon, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine (both photos).

Another woman and her two daughters in Gagnef. What are those pink flowers next to them?

The autochromes above are two of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker, 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 photos (A 436 and A 425) are © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.

Natchez, Mississippi

Cindy at enclos*ure3 Comments

Myrtle Bank terrace, Natchez, Mississippi, ca. 1900, from the Stewart Photograph Collection,* via Mississippi Department of Archives and History Commons on flickr (both photos).

The two houses shown here are about two blocks from each other, both on N. Pearl Street.

Major Benbrook residence, corner with B Street, ca. 1895, also from the Stewart Collection.

The neighborhood evidently had good water pressure. Both houses still stand.

In ancient Greece, the first hoses (for fire fighting) were made from ox intestines. In the late 17th century, Jan van der Heiden and his son sewed leather into long tubes for Amsterdam’s fire department. Then, in 1821 Boston, James Boyd invented a rubber-lined, cotton-webbed hose. By the 1870s, the first rubber and cotton fiber hoses for gardeners appeared on the market.

In 1895, a garden hose was the subject of what is believed to be the first comedy film, L’Arroseur Arrosé, by Louis Lumière. You can see it here.

*By brothers Robert Livingston Stewart and William Percy Stewart of Natchez, Mississippi, from ca. 1890 to ca. 1905.

The Sunday porch: summer reading

Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

reading-fonds-1266-item-5873-city-of-toronto-archives“M. Laing reading on porch at Bala, July 29, 1925,” via The Globe and Mail Collections (1266, item 5873), City of Toronto Archives.

‘Bala’ is probably Bala, Ontario, a summer cottage community north of Toronto.

Key West, Florida

Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

Royal Poinciana (Delonix regia) in bloom, Key West, Florida, ca. 1945, by Joseph Janney Steinmetz, via Florida Memory (State Library and Archives of Florida) Commons on flickr.

The Sunday porch: shade

Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

Owings Mills, near Baltimore, Maryland, July 1933, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (both photos).

Cropped slightly by me.