Posts Tagged photographs
One of the gems to be found in The Henry Ford’s archives is the Dave Friedman auto racing collection, particularly covering racing from the 1960s through 1990s. The collection came to us with about 100,000 images in already-digital format, and we’ve been adding these to our digital collections over time. We’ve just added 600 images documenting the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans race, including the one seen here, showing not only the racecars in motion, but also the more general racetrack environment of fans in the stands and corporate logos/mascots in the background. With the addition of this latest race, 11,518 items from the Friedman collection are now available on our collections website. Browse just the latest set added, or peruse all the Dave Friedman imagery, by visiting our digital collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Europe, 1960s, 20th century, racing, race cars, photographs, Le Mans, digital collections, cars, by Ellice Engdahl, archives
We do a lot of preparatory research in our collections for each episode of our television series, The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation. Sometimes, we find things that we weren’t expecting. That happened recently, when in investigating material related to food wagons, our registrar Lisa Korzetz recalled an image in our collection of a chuck wagon. Accompanying the chuck wagon photo, we found about a dozen more photographs of the American West in the 19th century, many in the Wyoming Territory, taken by the Dalgliesh Photo Studio and given to The Henry Ford in 1930 by George Dalgliesh, one of the photographers. The photos are an amazing record of everyday cowboy and ranch life in the West, so we’ve digitized all of them, including this image of the romantically named “Robbers Roost Road Ranch.” View all these newly digitized Western images by visiting our collections website.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Wyoming, 19th century, The Henry Ford's Innovation Nation, photographs, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
Over about a decade in the early part of the 20th century, a quartet including Henry Ford, inventor Thomas Edison, businessman Harvey Firestone, and naturalist John Burroughs took a series of summer camping trips, sometimes inviting others along for part or all of the journey. The group, calling themselves the Vagabonds, took trips that might not exactly qualify as “roughing it”—they travelled with a caravan of vehicles, a full contingent of service staff, and many comforts of home including furniture and china tableware. We’ve just digitized dozens of photos of the Vagabonds in action, including this photo of the group having breakfast at a large lazy susan–equipped wooden table. View more than 100 photos and artifacts related to the Vagabonds by visiting The Henry Ford’s digital collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
summer, photographs, Henry Ford, Firestone family, John Burroughs, Vagabonds, by Ellice Engdahl, digital collections
As the pre-Interstate American roadside has slowly disappeared, why has it taken on such meaning for us? Historical geographer David Lowenthal tried to explain it in his book with the unusual title, The Past is a Foreign Country. He said it has to do with our desire to re-establish a sense of place in an increasingly rootless world. Old buildings, old signs, old lampposts and fences—those genuine pieces of evidence that prove to us that an earlier, almost mythic time once existed—provide a sense of stability and permanence lacking in our present lives.
Today, we appreciate the buildings, signs, and landscapes of the American roadside for many different reasons: their pre-Modernist artistry; their funky and humorous attempts to beckon motorists during the Golden Age of road trips; or perhaps the entrepreneurial spirit of the many Mom-and-Pop establishments that tried to make a go of it before national chains and franchises took over. No matter what the reason, our appreciation inevitably relates to a respect for—even a reverence of—what once was but is no more. Continue Reading
photographs, John Margolies, travel, popular culture, photography, by Donna R. Braden, roads and road trips, Roadside America
From 1895 to 1924, the Detroit Publishing Company (DPC) created images that helped Americans see the world’s wonders from the comfort of their own homes. They used consumer desire for these images, coupled with determined sales tactics and the technical advantage of the Photochrom process that made lithographs look like color photographs (which did not yet exist), to sell up to 7 million prints annually at the company’s peak. As new technologies developed, DPC lost its competitive edge, and finally declared bankruptcy in 1924. The Henry Ford’s collection of DPC material includes 30,000 vintage photographic prints, 15,000 postcards, and 5,000 color and sepia lithographic prints. We’ve just digitized a representative sampling of these materials, based on selections made by former Curator of Photographs and Prints Cynthia Read Miller and others. The retouched photograph seen here can be compared to the unretouched version and the retouched and colorized version to gain an understanding of the DPC’s multistage process in preparing these images. If you’d like to browse more than 500 items from our DPC collection, including the vivid and visually arresting Photochroms, visit our digital collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Now that it’s June, amusement park season is really ramping up. In doing some related research in our archives for an upcoming post, Curator of Public Life Donna Braden turned up several folders of Detroit Publishing Company photos, shot around 1905, showing various views of Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York. We were so taken by these photos that we digitized all 80. You can now browse through photos of Coney Island at night (like the one shown here), the beach at Coney Island, and dozens of others. Visit our digital collections to see these images and other items related to Coney Island.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Does the building shown in this photograph look familiar to you? It might not ring a bell as the “Blacksmith Shop,” but that was its original purpose when it was built in Greenfield Village in 1929—which explains the horse being shod in this photo from the same year. Henry Ford intended the structure to be typical of 19th-century American blacksmith workshops, and had it furnished with equipment from a shop in Lapeer, Mich. Over the years, the building’s function has changed several times: it has been known as the Tinsmith Shop and the Activities Building, and currently it serves as the entrance to the Donald F. Kosch Village Playground. Visit our digital collections to see over 50 more newly-digitized photos of this building at various times in its history, and perhaps next time you visit our playground, you’ll take a second look at its historic entrance.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
photographs, Greenfield Village history, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
Just Added to Our Digital Collections: Dexter Press Photographs
John Margolies is both a photographer and a collector of items related to American travel and its unique sights. In preparation for our upcoming exhibit about Margolies and the American roadside, we’ve digitized a number of selections from this collection, including 35mm slides taken by John Margolies himself, and pennants and hotel/motel do-not-disturb signs he collected. This week, we add another grouping to that list: Dexter Press photographs dating between 1935 and 1950, designed to be used as postcards. The images, collected by Margolies, capture the same types of establishments he would photograph decades later: gas stations, diners, salons, and stores, such as the Dixie Liquor Store in St. Louis, MO, shown here. Browse more than 30 Dexter Press photos and postcards by visiting our Digital Collections, and be sure to mark your calendar to come see many of our Margolies items in person in the exhibit “Roadside America: Through the Lens of John Margolies” between June 20, 2015 and January 24, 2016.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
20th century, 1950s, 1940s, 1930s, travel, Roadside America, photographs, John Margolies, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
It frequently happens that we find mysteries in our collections, just waiting to be unlocked. This is the case for a series of about 200 glass plate negatives, which were found in a Highland Park, Michigan, house and eventually donated to The Henry Ford in 2012. The negatives mostly depict scenes from the Ford Motor Company Highland Park and Rouge plants, and seem to fill a gap in our collection of material created by the Ford Motor Company Photographic Department. However, there are some outliers in the group that could certainly use context, such as the barefoot girl posing for a portrait, or the children sitting in a mule-drawn carriage. If these images or the snowy scene depicted here pique your interest as a history detective, check out all the digitized negatives on our collections website, and let us know what you recognize.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Michigan, Ford Rouge Factory Complex, Ford Motor Company, photographs, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
As part of our collaboration with the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) and other Detroit-area community organizations to provide additional context for the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit exhibit at the DIA through July 12, 2015, The Henry Ford has been digitizing parts of our collection that relate to Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and their relationship with the Ford family and Ford Motor Company. We ran across a couple dozen 1932 photographs, including this one, of the Ford Motor Company Mexico City plant, all marked “Kahlo Foto,” and wondered whether these might be the work of Frida Kahlo’s father Guillermo Kahlo. An essay in the exhibit catalog by Diego Rivera’s grandson Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera notes “Don Guillermo was considered the finest architecture photographer in Mexico, a master in the field…. Diego respected Don Guillermo … for his studies of industrial machinery: Don Guillermo recorded the day-to-day modern development of the country; every factory and every major engine installation became the subject matter of his photographs, which were published in the Mexican press as an indisputable symbol of the nation’s advancing progress.” We haven’t yet found any further information about the genesis of these images, but it seems likely, given the labels on the images, Guillermo Kahlo’s architectural photography background, and the year the images were taken (the same year Rivera started work on the Detroit Industry murals at the DIA), that these images have a tie to Frida and Diego’s time in Detroit and relationship with the Fords. Visit our collections website to see all of these images, as well as the other related material we’ve digitized.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Michigan, Detroit, 20th century, 1930s, photographs, Ford Motor Company, digital collections, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts, by Ellice Engdahl, art
