Early Modern Dance: From the New York Public Library on Flickr

Early Modern Dance: The Denishawn Collection   These are from the 68 images in the Denishawn Collection on the Flickr Commons. Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn established the Denishawn School in 1915.

Ruth St. Denis in Radha.
Digital ID: DEN_0032V. ca. 1906

Ruth St. Denis in Radha.
Digital ID: DEN_0074V. Sarony, Otto — Photographer. 1908.

Ruth St. Denis in Radha at the housewarming of Frank Haven.
Digital ID: DEN_0090V. ca. 1910

Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in Egyptian Ballet.
Digital ID: DEN_0183

Digital ID: DEN_0370V. Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in an out-of-doors photo, in costume, for National Geographic Magazine, April 1916, reprinted May 1951.. 1915.

Digital ID: DEN_0664V. Ted Shawn in Cosmic Dance of Siva during Ziegfield Follies Tour.. 1928

Flickr Commons: Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands

Here are a few items from the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands collections in the Flickr Commons.

Can’t get enough of zeppelins and balloons, one of the collections from this source.

Santos-Dumont vaart met een zeppelin langs de Eiffeltoren / Zeppelin passing the Eiffel Tower
SFA003000116

 

‘Allo Spaceboy!

“Ruimtepak” voor stratosfeerballon / Space suit for stratospheric balloon, 1935

 

Zeppelin bij Empire State Building in aanbouw / Zeppelin near the Empire State Building under construction. The American airship ZR 3 Los Angeles flying near the Empire State Building under construction. The Zeppelin, built as LZ 126, is accompanied by some blimps. New York, the United States of America, 29 October 1930.

Another collection deals with tobacco:

Smokkelen van sigaretten in een boek /Smuggling cigarettes in a book. Germany, 1932.

Automaat voor brandende sigaretten / Cigarette machine delivering burning cigarettes for a penny. England, 1931.

Another, called Allerzielen, Allerheiligen / All Souls’ Day, All Saints’ Day, features graves.

Graven van Vincent en Theo van Gogh. The graves of the famous Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and his brother Theo [Theodore] van Gogh (1857-1891) at the churchyard in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. Photo out of 1927.

Another focuses on “new life”:

Uit ei gebroken kuiken/Chick facing daylight for the first time, 1936.

Inventions, some stranger than others:

Houten badpakken /Wooden bathing suits, supposed to make swimming a lot easier. Haquian, Washington, USA, 1929

 

Eénwielige motorfiets / One wheel motor cycle. Invented by Italian M. Goventosa de Udine. Maximum speed: 150 kilometers per hour ( 93 Mph).

Gasaanvalbestendige kinderwagen / Gas war resistant pram, England, Hextable, 1938.

 

 

 

Flickr Commons: National Archives, UK. Famous People.

I’ve been neglecting the blog because I moved house, to a new state: a major change. But I’m picking up where I left off.

Here are some shots of famous folks from the 20th Century Photographs set in the  National Archives, United Kingdom on the Flickr Commons.

Miss Hepburn on set
“Miss Katherine [sic] Hepburn & Mr. Mike Owen, Manager, taken during the filming of the T.V. Film of ‘The Corn is Green’ “. Bersham Colliery, Wrexham.
http://flic.kr/p/97rxRy

 

Photographs of Eric Blair (George Orwell) from his Metropolitan Police file. c.1940 http://flic.kr/p/5A2uxN

 

Princess Elizabeth at a Trooping of the Colour ceremony for her father George VI. c.1950. http://flic.kr/p/5CZRaw

 

Chamberlain and Il Duce. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain receives the red carpet treatment in Rome from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. January 1939. http://flic.kr/p/5zMp9B

 

“Lord Baden-Powell, the Chief Scout, at his home, Pax Hill, Bentley, Hants. Close up at ‘personal’ desk in study”. Photograph taken by John Dixon Scott. c. 1926-39. http://flic.kr/p/8t3C1k

 

Actress and socialite Lillie Langtry photographed by William Downey (1829-1915). August 1885. http://flic.kr/p/8t3C1k

 

Future Prime Minister Anthony Eden painted while Foreign Secretary by William Little. WWII. http://flic.kr/p/6CwGmS

 

Signed photograph of General Charles de Gaulle, future president of the French Republic, extracted from a file on the Czech assault on Dunkirk. 1945. http://flic.kr/p/6CwGn1

Dr. Alice S. Kandell Collection of Sikkim Photographs, Library of Congress: 2. The Land.

These images are from the Dr. Alice S. Kandell Collection of Sikkim Photographs at the Library of Congress, described in my last post.

Rainbow in the mountains of Lachung, Sikkim. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30228

Sikkim, dry season, rice terraces. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30789

Rice terraces during dry season, Sikkim. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30792 (

Building in the mountains of Lachung, Sikkim. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30809

Tsongmo Lake, along the Nathu La Pass, Sikkim. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30136

Primula flowers at Pemayangtse in western Sikkim. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30105

Bridge, North Sikkim near Tibet. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30892

Mount Kānchenjunga, third highest mountain in the world. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30100

Dr. Alice S. Kandell Collection of Sikkim Photographs, Library of Congress: 1. Religious Practices.

These images are from a special collection at the Library of Congress:

[The] Dr. Alice S. Kandell Collection of Sikkim Photographs portrays the people and landscape of a kingdom high in the Himalaya Mountains. Sikkim, now part of India, borders on Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. Dr. Kandell captured these vivid scenes in order to document a vanishing culture. During visits between 1965 and 1979 (primarily 1965-1971), Dr. Kandell received special permission to photograph Buddhist monks and lamas, ceremonial dances, and monasteries; people working on farms, in canning factories, and at special crafts; and the royal palace and chapel at Gangtok, including the last king, Chogyal Palden Thondup Namgyal, his American wife Queen Hope Cooke (Dr. Kandell’s college friend), and their family.

Also depicted are the villages and people of Singhik and Lachung, the mountains of Kānchenjunga, the Ralang Hot Springs, and the Gangtok bazaar as well as different ethnic groups including the Kirati (Kiranti), Lepcha, Nepalese, and Bhutia people. Other photographs show the material culture, including religious paintings, ceremonial masks, jewelry and carpets. Special events feature the coronation in 1965 and the wedding of Princess Yanchen Dolma and Simon Abraham in 1979.

Dr. Alice S. Kandell dedicated her rights to the public domain when making this generous gift to the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, in 2010. The entire collection includes approximately 15,000 photographs available for research use at the Library.

About 300 have been digitized.

Credit lines should read as follows:

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Dr. Alice S. Kandell Collection of Sikkim Photographs, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-123456]

Lamas spinning prayer wheels at old Rumtek Monastery, Sikkim. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30144

Monk fixing clock above painting, Sikkim. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30150

Boys blowing gyalings in front of palace temple, Gangtok, Sikkim. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30187

Blue Mahakala dancer initiating the New Year's ceremony, Gangtok, Sikkim. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30195

Black Hat Lama in a procession down the mountain to sacrifice objects, Sikkim. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30211

Guruda bird dancer performing at the New Year's dance, Sikkim. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30773

Hex, symbolizing person’s spirit, thrown in the road for devil to be decoyed. Used in Bon practices, Sikkim. LC-DIG-ppmsca-30870

Woman turns prayer wheel in front of the Do-Drul Chorten stupa. LC-DIG-ppmsca-31643

Lama turning prayer wheel activating prayers. LC-DIG-ppmsca-31642

Weddings of the Rich and Famous

Looking for “brides” in the Library of Congress’s Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, I found a number of public domain images of weddings of famous people. Here is a selection:

Bouvier-Kennedy wedding portrait, Sept. 12, 1953. Photographer: Toni Frissell. LC-USZC4-4892

Pres. Richard Nixon escorts his daughter Tricia at her White House Rose Garden wedding. Photographer: Warren K. Leffler. June 12, 1971. LC-DIG-ppmsca-03410

 

Vanderbilt-Szechenyi wedding - Official portrait of Count Szechenyi, made just before he married Gladys Vanderbilt, 1907. LC-USZ62-69601

 

Princess Mary's wedding coach. 1922. LC-B2- 5711-3

 

Tenor Enrico Caruso- Dorothy Park Benjamin Wedding Party, 1918. LC-DIG-ggbain-27427

 

President Roosevelt, with Alice Roosevelt-Longworth and Hon. Nicholas Longworth in bridal array. March 22, 1906. LC-DIG-stereo-1s01932

 

 

 

 

Ladies’ Hats

If it seems there have been a lot of photographs of strange hats on ladies’ heads these past few weeks, first at the royal wedding and then the Kentucky derby, consider that such sights are anything but new. Have a look at these absurdities, all from the Library of Congress’s online image collection.

At least Fergie’s daughters’ silly hats didn’t contribute to the extinction of any species. The same cannot be said of these. By 1900,  egrets and herons had been hunted almost to the point of extinction, and the decimation in the United States was only stopped by the passage of the Lacey Act.  Worldwide, the slaughter continued, and a 1913 source states that:

In 1911, the feathers of 129,000 egrets; 13,598 herons; 20,698 birds of paradise; 41,090 hummingbirds; 9,464 eagles, condors and other birds of prey; and 9,472 other birds were sold at auction in London for the millinery trade.

You can read more about that here.

LC-USZ62-61248

LC-USZ62-74338

Los Angeles airplane hat, ca. 1910. LC-USZ62-97163

[Lillian Russell, c. 1898. LC-USZ62-44168

I’m not sure whether real feathers were used to construct the artificial birds for this get-up, but I expect so.

Christie MacDonald wearing artificial birds on a hat and on the bodice of her dress.LC-USZ62-117332

At least no birds died for this oddity:

LC-USZ62-76012

And then there is this. The woman is identified as Marie Dressler, and she also appears in a caricature from a book called Stage Folk. At least she may be remembered in some context other than simply as a lady who wore a silly hat in 1909.

LC-USZ62-126186

LC-USZ62-126183

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today’s images are in honor of Martin Luther King Day. The first two are from the Library of Congress. Those with ARC Identifiers are from the National Archives.

Martin Luther King, Jr. photographed by Marion S. Trikosko, 1964. LC-DIG-ppmsc-01269

 

Martin Luther King Jr. Birth Home, 501 Auburn Avenue, Atlanta, Fulton, GA. HABS GA,61-ATLA,48-

Snow

Here are a handful of snowflakes, courtesy of the NOAA Photo Library National Weather Service (NWS) Collection.

Image 890 of "Studies among the Snow Crystals ... " by Wilson Bentley, "The Snowflake Man." From Annual Summary of the "Monthly Weather Review" for 1902. Bentley was a bachelor farmer whose hobby was photographing snow flakes. ID# wea02098

Happy Birthday, Philip Pullman

October 19 is novelist Philip Pullman’s birthday. I started looking for public domain images on the internet when I was compiling a guide to his trilogy, His Dark Materials. So today I’ve decided to indulge myself and return to have a look at some of these.

The characters in His Dark Materials move between worlds. One of them is ours, and one, the setting of the first novel, Northern Lights in the UK and The Golden Compass in the US, is a lot like ours, but has a number of intriguing differences. One is that the soul or conscience, the essence that distinguishes humans, called a dæmon, is externalized in the form of an animal. In childhood a person’s dæmon can change forms, but once puberty is reached, it settles in one species’ form.

In the course of the story, the main character, Lyra, matures into a young woman. As a child, one of her dæmon Pantalaimon’s favorite forms was that of a pine marten, and that is what Pan settles as. Here, courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, is a delightful image of a pine marten.

 Pine Marten. By Erwin and Peggy Bauer. FWS

Another wonderful dæmon is Hester, whose person is Lee Scoresby, a brave and compassionate aëronaut. Hester settled as a hare, and this jackrabbit at Yellowstone National Park reminded me of her. 

 

 Jackrabbit. By W.L. Miller for the National Park Service

In Lyra’s world, history has taken a different route as well, but some of the peoples, if not nations, are the same as in ours. Lyra’s father tells her he’ll bring her back a carved walrus tusk from his travels to the Arctic, and one of the windows connecting her world to ours is not far from Nunivak, Alaska. So I was pleased to find this image in the Library of Congress:

The ivory carver–Nunivak by Edward Curtis, 1929. LC-USZ62-74131

A turquoise ring of his mother’s  is important to Lee Scoresby and Stanislaus Grumman, who in our world was an explorer but when he accidentally found himself in Lyra’s took instruction from a Siberian shaman.

  Navajo silversmith by William J. Carpenter, 1915. LC-USZ62-99580

 

Goldi shaman priest and assistant by William Henry Jackson, 1895.  LC-USZC2-6391