I couldn’t have foreseen as a young photographer that I would logically inherit and hold the family photographs. It was somebody’s wisdom. They turned out to be gems of photography and a
unpolished view of history. I am now age fifty-four and my contributors are few.
The collection spans five generations and most of the history of photography. Most images arrived with a colorful hand me down story, some only carried a single clue inscribed in the margin or stamped on the back. The oldest images are one of a kind and others are derived from old and dangerous nitrocellulose negatives. Some were only in my hands long enough to scan them to digital. The color work from the sixties is fading fast. There are beautiful hand-tinted images, Polaroids, Kodachromes and the grainy 110. The images have been restored to taste and are posted in non-chronological order
These are my relatives and the people who crossed our paths. They have this great story. Here they set sail on the ocean of the web.
Harry Snowden
Posts tagged: Vintage
The Day Job
Flamingo Motel - c. 1951
Las Vegas, Nevada
Mom’s very cool day job swimming in Johnny Weissmuller’s aqua show at the Flamingo in Vegas. It had to be more exciting then anything involving a name tag.
Photographs from the collection of Harry Snowden
Parkview Drive
Plymouth, Michigan
1959
A very old slide of my first house. It has that retro deterioration look that is a popular processing trick in digital photography. I’m inside…cloth diapers I’m sure.
Photographs from the collection of Harry Snowden
Women in a wrinkled dress
Unknown
ND
3-3/8” x 5-3/8”
Postcard back without marks. There are no clues other that it is exactly the same style as a picture of my grandmother in 1917. I’m told these images were commonly taken at dance halls. No one can ID the women for me. It came to me in the collection so she must have been a relative or a close friend of my grandparents.
Photographs from the collection of Harry Snowden
Puppeteers
Lansing, Michigan
1938
5 x 7 inches
Photography by Hulbert
Allen Street School still operates as a grade school on Kalamazoo street. That is my Mother, age 12 years, standing on the chair.
Photographs from the collection of Harry Snowden
Replica of Diplodocus
Vernal, Utah
1967
Cross country road trips in the 1960s! We stopped at Dinosaur National Monument on this trip west. But this isn’t it. This particular skeleton is actually in the city of Vernal, Utah at the Utah Field House of Natural History. My sister and I posed for the shot.
Photographs from the collection of Harry Snowden
Feeding the bears
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
1929
Printed on Velox paper: 5-7/8 x 3-3/4 inches
This is my great aunt Margaret and uncle Brewster feeding a bear cub in Yellowstone National Park. I laugh and shake my head in disbelief every time I see this image.
Photographs from the collection of Harry Snowden
Portrait of Thomas Brewster
ND
The image has notes on verso: Thomas Brewster - born 1828. Great grandfather to George and Walter Ellis. Married Fanny Moore (born 1816). They ran the “Fox and Hounds Pub” in Mt. Pleasent -Thorpe - Audlin in Yorkshire.
This image came from my mother’s side. Traveled across the Atlantic from Retford Nottinghamshire England with my grandparents after world war one. This is a great portrait from a unknown photographer. This would be my great-great grandfather. Love the pipe.
Photographs from the collection of Harry Snowden
