28 Amazing Photographs Capture Everyday Life in China From the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

William Charles White was an Anglican Bishop educated at Wycliffe College in Toronto and ordained as an Anglican Minister in 1896. He worked as a missionary in China from 1909-1934, and became the first Anglican bishop of Henan Province in 1910.

During his time in China, he developed a great interest in Chinese culture and literature and became a collector for the Royal Ontario Museum. Bishop White was also Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Toronto until 1948.

The photographs in these sets depict life in China and missionary work from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, especially in Hangzhou (Zhejiang Province) and Fuzhou (Fujian Province). Of special interest are photographs of Chinese craftspeople at work, and photographs of the graves of victims of the Kucheng Massacre at the mission cemetery of Fuzhou.

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Photos Capture People at Parties in the 1980s

The 1980s was a very unique era of time. It was full of loud colors, extreme fashion, sky high hair, and forever defining music.

’80s fashion was big on accessories. The trendiest items included scrunchies, leg warmers, fingerless gloves, plastic bangles, large funky earrings in neon shades, mesh accents, fanny packs and pearl necklaces.

So what did people wear for parties in the 1980s? Check out these vintage photos to see.

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Bruce Gilden’s Gritty Pictures of 1970s and 1980s New York

Bruce Gilden is an American street photographer. Known for his graphic and often confrontational close-ups made using flash, his images have a degree of intimacy and directness that have become a signature in his work. 

Gilden was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946. He studied sociology at Penn State University but didn’t complete the course. Although he briefly flirted with the idea of being an actor, Gilden decided to become a photographer in 1967, when he bought his first camera. He attended evening classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York, but largely considers himself to be self-taught.

1978

After recently moving house, Gilden discovered hundreds of contact prints and negatives in his personal archives, from work undertaken in New York, his native city, between 1978 and 1984. From these thousands of images, most of which are new even to their author, Gilden has selected around a hundred for his book Lost and Found. Extending from the desire to revisit the work of his youth, this historic archive constitutes an inestimable treasure.

In Lost and Found, an extraordinary New York is portrayed, revealing an unknown facet of Gilden’s oeuvre. With all the energy of a young man in his thirties, Gilden launched an assault on New York in a visibly tense atmosphere. These pictures are almost all made without the use of flash which was – soon after – to become his trademark. Gilden reflects that he was “probably in a transition period at that time, wanting to use flash more and make more dramatic photos. Maybe that’s why I overlooked these images…”

In this extraordinary gallery of portraits, the compositions—mostly horizontal—simmer with energy, bursting with the most diverse characters, as though Gilden intended to include within the frame everything that caught his eye.

1978

1978

1979

1979

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30 Found Photographs of People at Home From the Late 19th Century

Victorian decorating was the polar opposite of today’s modern styles. It was a time of heavy, ornate furnishings, oversized everything, and a penchant for knickknacks. The resulting style is romantic, complex, warm, and dramatic, dripping with opulence and excess; basically, enough to make any minimalist shudder.

Victorian furniture is often revivalist in style, in that it adopts stylistic motifs from other periods, creating huge waves of revivals with nostalgic nods to the past. Victorian furniture pieces are valued for their opulence and elegance.

There is a rich variety within Victorian furniture designs, each piece having been influenced by its individual revival. Pieces can be identified by their iconic features which make them authentic to their time.

These found photos from Winterthur Library that captured people at home from between the 1870s and 1890s.

People seated on and by staircase

Family grouped around Christmas tree

Family in room with piano

Family reading in corner of room

Family reading in room

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Pictures of North Korea Industries in 1972

In June 1972, The Toronto Star’s veteran Asia correspondent Mark Gayn was one of four reporters allowed into North Korea. The trip yielded four lengthy feature stories, published in The Star in July 1972, where Gayn detailed the country’s political landscape, then dominated by Kim Il Sung, and its people.

These photos are among the many Gayn took of his journeys through the country. These particular photos spotlight the various industries of North Korea. At the time, Gayn writes, his North Korean hosts, the Union of Journalists, were trying to convey that North Korea “is a sort of Asian Belgium, industrialized, sophisticated, well-off,” and that Kim Il Sung had abolished manual labor in the countryside.

Gayn, however, saw things differently. “If this is a modern industrial state,” he writes, “its way of life and its daily idiom are unfamiliar to a man from the West. It is also clear that Kim’s North Korea is a welfare state to make most Communist states seem bourgeois.”

Medical facility. June 1972, Pyongyang, North Korea.

Automated shoe factory. June 1972, Pyongyang, North Korea.

Textile mill. June 1972, Pyongyang, North Korea.

“Modern” industrial printing factory. June 1972, North Korea.

Large kindergarten for taking care of women laborers’ and office workers’ children. June 1972, North Korea.

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Fascinating Black and White Photos of Life in an English Coal Town From the 1970s to 1990s

Mik Critchlow is a social documentary photographer based in the North East of England. On seeing an exhibition of paintings in 1977 by 'The Ashington Group' (Pitmen Painters), a group of Ashington men brought together in 1934 by the Workers Educational Association for Art Appreciation classes, he realized the value of art as social document, the visual representation of everyday life, by one’s own knowledge and personal experiences.

In the same year, he began a long-term photography project documenting his hometown of Ashington in Northumberland. The son of a miner, he has worked within the community with a deep-rooted empathy for the townsfolk, documenting the area and its people during a rapid period of social and environmental change. 

Ashington was once a center of the coal mining industry. The first evidence of mining is from bell-shaped pits and monastic mine workings discovered in the 20th Century during tunneling. It developed from a small hamlet in the 1840s when the Duke of Portland built housing to encourage people escaping the Great Famine of Ireland to come and work at his nearby collieries. As in many other parts of Britain, "deep pit" coal mining in the area declined during the 1980s and 1990s. During the heyday of coal mining, Ashington was considered to be the "world's largest coal-mining village".

Take a look at life in Ashington from the late 1970s to 1990s through these 30 brilliant photographs taken by Critchlow:

Ashington, Northumberland

Colliery Housing, 1977

Northern Social Club, 1977

Poplar Street, 1977

Saturday morning, Hirst Miners Welfare Club, 1977

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Images of the West: The Lantern Slides of Blackfeet Indians Taken by Walter McClintock

Pittsburgh native Walter McClintock graduated from Yale in 1891. In 1896 he traveled west as a photographer for a federal commission investigating national forests. McClintock became friends with the expedition’s Blackfoot Indian scout, William Jackson or Siksikakoan. When the commission completed its field work, Jackson introduced McClintock to the Blackfoot community of northwestern Montana. Over the next twenty years, supported by the Blackfoot elder Mad Wolf, McClintock made several thousand photographs of the Blackfoot, their homelands, their material culture, and their ceremonies.

Like his contemporary, the photographer Edward Curtis, McClintock believed that Indian communities were undergoing swift, dramatic transformations that might obliterate their traditional culture. He sought to create a record of a life-way that might disappear. He wrote books, mounted photographic exhibitions, and delivered numerous public lectures about the Blackfoot.

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Life Before World War II: Fascinating Color Photographs Capture Everyday Life in Budapest, Hungary in 1939

Though the history of color photography dates back more than a hundred years, the production and publication of color enlargements (photopositives) has only been widespread since the 1940s, when color film first entered mass use. These fascinating color photographs were taken by an unknown photographer using Agfacolor, they show everyday life in Budapest in 1939, just before the Second World War.

Agfacolor was the name of a series of color film products made by Agfa of Germany. The first Agfacolor, introduced in 1932, was a film-based version of their Agfa-Farbenplatte (Agfa color plate), a “screen plate” product similar to the French Autochrome. In late 1936 Agfa introduced Agfacolor Neu (New Agfacolor), a pioneering color film of the general type still in use today.

The new Agfacolor was originally a reversal film used for making “slides”, home movies and short documentaries. By 1939 it had also been adapted into a negative film and a print film for use by the German motion picture industry. After World War II, the Agfacolor brand was applied to several varieties of color negative film for still photography, in which the negatives were used to make color prints on paper. The reversal film was then marketed as Agfachrome. These films use Color Developing Agent 1 in their color developer.

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Black and White Photos of Tokyo’s Street Portraits in the Early 1980s

In Japan during the 1980s, the economy was in a boom where buyers found themselves paying the highest prices for goods and commodities.

As of March 1980, the unemployment rate in Japan was 4.9%; a very low number compared to the unemployment rate during the height of the 1990s. The following decade would see Japan’s economy decline substantially, giving rise to the name the ‘Lost Decade’.

In the 1980s, Tokyo was starting to resemble other large metropolitan cities around the world, of course with a Japanese flavor. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was fresh, naive, mujaki, sweet, and nothing like other big cities around to world.

These fascinating black and white photos were taken by Lawrence Impey that show street portraits of Tokyo in April 1981.

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Vintage Found Photos of People Reading in the Past

When thinking about reading, most of us take it for granted. It’s just there, it’s a thing we are given, nobody has to try hard to learn to read.

So why do we read? Because reading increases your vocabulary and your knowledge of how to correctly use new words, reading helps you clearly articulate what you want to say. The knowledge you gain from reading also gives you lots to talk about with others.

Unfortunately many people’s relationship with books is going through a rough patch due to the social media era and the convenience of smartphones. Before them, here is a vintage photo collection from simpleinsomnia that shows people reading in the past.

Family reading around the dining room table, circa 1900

Woman rests in a large hammock, circa 1900s

Couple reading books in front of a fireplace, circa 1910s

Group listening to a woman read aloud, circa 1910s

Man with a pipe reading a book, circa 1910s

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