The Kings of Hollywood, 1957

Slim Aaron’s most celebrated image was shot on New Year’s Eve of 1957 in the Crown Room at Romanoff’s restaurant in Hollywood. The photograph, known as The Kings of Hollywood, shows four great film leading men Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart enjoy a joke at Romanoff's restaurant in Beverly Hills on the last day of 1957.

Film stars (left to right) Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper and James Stewart enjoy a joke at a New Year’s party held at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills. (Photo by Slim Aarons/Getty Images)

“I had done photographs from my New York apartment at 57th and Park to help Alfred Hitchcock on the set design for Rear Window, and I’d gotten to know Jimmy Stewart,” Aarons recalled. “I was friends with Gable too—I [later] hung around with him when he was filming It Started in Naples with Sophia Loren, and even played a small part in the movie. When my wife and I went to parties at stars’ homes in Los Angeles, I would never go off later and knock them, and they knew that. So when I walked over to the bar at Romanoff’s with my camera, I wasn’t an intruder. In fact, the reason these guys are laughing is that Gable is telling them how bad he thought I’d be in the movie.”

Over the course of a career lasting half a century, Slim Aarons (1916–2006) portrayed high society, aristocracy, authors, artists, business icons, the celebrated and their milieu. In doing so, he captured a golden age of wealth, privilege, beauty and leisure that occurred alongside—but quite separate from—the cultural and political backdrop of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Around the World in the 1950s and 1960s in Kodachrome

Martin Karplus (born March 15, 1930) is an Austrian and American theoretical chemist. He is the Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory, a joint laboratory between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Strasbourg, France. He is also the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, emeritus at Harvard University. Karplus received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”.

Karplus has a love for cameras and photography. From the 1950s and 1960s, he traveled to Europe, America and Asia. Intent on recording what he witnessed, Karplus took many pictures during those travels with his Leica. Through his photographs, Karplus wants to “preserve my vision of a world, much of which no longer exists.

Navaho

“Economic development, universal communication, and war have taken a heavy toll,” wrote Karplus in his essay “Martin Karplus: IMAGES OF THE 1950’s and 1960’s”. “Many of the towns and villages have been destroyed or replaced, everyday costumes of the time are worn only at events for tourists, and much of the social fabric of the communities has been destroyed. Many of the people I photographed belonged to the last generation to live in a way that had lasted for centuries. The areas I visited in Europe and America had their own traditions, many of which have now disappeared as the world has been homogenized.”

Take a look through these stunning Kodachrome photographs of the world in the 1950s and 1960s:

Grand Canyon, Arizona

Rome

Near Ohrid, Macedonia

Beaune Hospice, France

See more»

Photographs of a Woman’s Dream of Becoming America’s First Police Woman, 1909

Vintage photographs of a suffragette posed to illustrate woman police concept in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1909.

In 1854, the first police matrons were hired by New York City to search and guard female prisoners, but they were civilians with no law enforcement powers. From this beginning, women became encouraged to apply for similar positions in various parts of the United States.

In 1910, the Los Angeles Police Department appointed the first regularly rated policewomen, Mrs. Alice Stebbins Wells. Her appointment refuted the popular notion of matrons as being masculine and not very bright, because she was a college graduate, a social worker, and had deliberately sought the position of police officer.

Mrs. Wells soon became a pioneer in the national movement to have police departments hire women as officers. However, from the inception of this movement, women were hired by quotas and encountered discrimination, silent contempt, and double standards. Several court cases are discussed to illustrate the hurdles women had to fight to reach equality of employment in police agencies.

Today policewomen are involved in all aspects of police work. Cases in which policewomen have been prominent in various police departments are enumerated.

Many people could not even imagine what a female police officer would look like so this Ohio suffragette demonstrated what a policewoman would look like making an arrest.

(Photos: Library of Congress)

Sublime and Atmospheric Photos By Léonard Misonne

Léonard Misonne (1870 – 1943) was a Belgian pictorialist photographer. He is best known for his atmospheric photographs of landscapes and street scenes, with light as a key feature, and as a pioneer of pictorialism. According to the Directory of Belgian Photographers, “Misonne’s work is characterised by a masterly treatment of light and atmospheric conditions. His images express poetic qualities, but sometimes slip into an anecdotal sentimentality.”

 

Misonne would often photograph things that were strongly illuminated from behind, producing a halo effect. He would also retouch the lighting effects in his photographs, experimenting with and using many techniques, such as the Fresson process and later the bromoil and mediobrome processes. “If I were asked what I have learned during my forty years as a photographer,” said Misonne, nicknamed “the Corot of photography”. “I should reply – the most important thing I have learned is to observe the beautiful effects of atmosphere and light.” He also invented the “flou-net” and “photo-dessin” processes.

Take a look through these extraordinary photographs taken by Misonne:

See more»

The Man Who Shot the Seventies: Stunning Photographs of Rock Stars Taken by Mick Rock

The legendary rock photographer Mick Rock, often referred as “The Man Who Shot the Seventies,” has died aged 72. The news was confirmed by his representative in a statement that described Rock as a “photographic poet” and “a true force of nature who spent his days doing exactly what he loved, always in his own delightfully outrageous way”.

Mick Rock (November 22, 1948 – November 18, 2021) photographed rock music acts such as Queen, David Bowie, T. Rex, Syd Barrett, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and The Stooges, The Sex Pistols, Ozzy Osbourne, The Ramones, Joan Jett, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, Thin Lizzy, Geordie, Mötley Crüe, and Blondie. Often referred to as “The Man Who Shot the Seventies,” most of the memorable shots of Bowie as Ziggy Stardust were shot by Rock in his capacity as Bowie’s official photographer.

During his time at Cambridge, Rock picked up a friend’s camera and started to take pictures of the local rock music scene, acquiring some friends and contacts along the way (including Cambridge native Syd Barrett and Mick Jagger’s younger brother Chris).

Rock’s career continued to soar with key 1970s images like Lou Reed’s Transformer, Iggy Pop’s Raw Power and Queen’s Queen II and many of the Sex Pistols’ infamous shots. In 1977, he moved permanently to New York, where he quickly became involved with the underground music scene pioneered by The Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie. His pictures, including The Ramones’ End of the Century, captured the revolutionary spirit of this groundbreaking period and made him the one of the most sought-after photographers in the world.

His photo subjects include The Misfits, Snoop Dogg, Air Traffic, Maxwell, Alicia Keys, The Gossip, Lady Gaga, Richard Barone, The Killers, The Scissor Sisters, Michael Bublé, Miley Cyrus, Michael Stipe, Kate Moss, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Chemical Brothers, Janelle Monáe, Queens of the Stone Age, Daft Punk, Kasabian, Snow Patrol, Daniel Merriweather, Black Keys, Hall & Oates, Peter, Bjorn and John, MGMT, Alejandro Escovedo, Pete Yorn, Gavin Degraw, Peaches, Fat Joe, Rhymefest, Nas, Q-Tip, Jane’s Addiction, Tom Stoppard, and old friends Bowie, Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, Joan Jett, Mötley Crüe, Nicos Gun, and Iggy Pop.

His retrospective at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2003 was hailed as “one of the most exciting exhibitions of pop culture imagery to ever reach these shores.” In late 2006, Mick Rock received the Diesel U Music Legends Award for his contribution to Music.

See more»

Stunning Portrait of a Young Woman Smiling, ca. 1880

Photographed by Carlos Relvas (1838–1894), a pioneer of amateur photography in Portugal.

Carlos Relvas was born in the Outeiro Palace, in Golegã, a small village in the rural province of Ribatejo in Portugal. His father, José Farinha Relvas de Campos was one of the wealthiest landowners in Ribatejo. He was educated by private tutors in science and foreign languages, namely French.

Of an artistic disposition, he soon turned to photography. In 1876, he had an opulent atelier built in one of his properties in Golegã, and bought several of the most modern photographic apparatuses from all over Europe. His photographic works became very well known and highly valued in Portugal: it did not take long until Carlos Relvas was considered the finest amateur photographer in the country. He became a member of the Société française de photographie, and many of his photographs were showcased in several exhibitions, both national and abroad, and won many prizes.

Stunning Autochrome Pictures of Petra, Jordan From the 1900s to 1940s

Petra is a historic and archaeological city in southern Jordan. It is adjacent to the mountain of Jabal Al-Madbah, in a basin surrounded by mountains forming the eastern flank of the Arabah valley running from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba.

Famous for its rock-cut architecture and water conduit system, Petra is also called the “Red Rose City” because of the color of the stone from which it is carved. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985 and has been described as “one of the most precious cultural properties of man's cultural heritage” Petra is a symbol of Jordan, as well as Jordan's most-visited tourist attraction.

These stunning autochrome pictures of the ancient Nabatean stone city were taken by the photography department of the American Colony from between the late 1900s to the 1940s. Take a look:

See more»

20 Stunning Portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe was a 20th century American painter and pioneer of American modernism best known for her canvases depicting flowers, skyscrapers, animal skulls and southwestern landscapes.

Born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, Georgia Totto O’Keeffe grew up on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O’Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, where she learned the techniques of traditional painting. The direction of her artistic practice shifted dramatically four years later when she studied the revolutionary ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow offered O’Keeffe an alternative to established ways of thinking about art. She experimented with abstraction for two years while she taught art in West Texas. Through a series of abstract charcoal drawings, she developed a personal language to better express her feelings and ideas.

O’Keeffe mailed some of these highly abstract drawings to a friend in New York City. Her friend showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, the art dealer and renowned photographer, who would eventually become O’Keeffe’s husband. He became the first to exhibit her work, in 1916.

By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe was recognized as one of America’s most important and successful artists, known for her paintings of New York skyscrapers—an essentially American symbol of modernity—as well as her equally radical depictions of flowers.

In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to northern New Mexico. The stark landscape and Native American and Hispanic cultures of the region inspired a new direction in O’Keeffe’s art. For the next two decades she spent most summers living and working in New Mexico. She made the state her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death.

O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings coincided with a growing interest in regional scenes by American Modernists seeking a distinctive view of the nation. In the 1950s, O’Keeffe began to travel internationally. She painted and sketched works that evoke the spectacular places she visited, including the mountain peaks of Peru and Japan’s Mount Fuji. At the age of seventy-three, she took on a new subject: aerial views of clouds and sky. Suffering from macular degeneration and failing vision, O’Keeffe painted her last unassisted oil painting in 1972. However, O’Keeffe’s will to create did not diminish with her eyesight. In 1977, at age ninety, she observed, “I can see what I want to paint. The thing that makes you want to create is still there.”

Late in life, and almost blind, she enlisted the help of several assistants to enable her to continue creating art. In these works, she drew on favorite motifs from memory and her vivid imagination. Georgia O’Keeffe died in Santa Fe on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98.

See more»

Group Portraits of Women’s Ice Hockey Teams From the Early 20th Century

Ice hockey is believed to have evolved from simple stick and ball games played in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United Kingdom, Ireland and elsewhere, primarily bandy, hurling, shinty and lacrosse. Arguably the games most influential to the early design of ice hockey were early forms of an organized sport today known as bandy, a sport distinctly separate from ice hockey. These games were brought to North America and several similar winter games using informal rules developed, such as shinny and ice polo, but would later be absorbed into a new organized game with codified rules which today is ice hockey.

Women’s hockey teams started forming early in the 20th century, though there wouldn’t be a professional league for a long time. Women still played casually hockey for fun, and so before long, they started getting organized.

The first formal women’s match happened in Ontario in 1891; however, women’s teams didn’t really get going until the 1910s and 1920s when college teams started to form in the US and especially in Canada. Below are some vintage photos of women’s ice hockey teams from between the 1900s and 1920s:

See more»

Amazingly Surreal Portraits of Leonardo DiCaprio Taken by David LaChapelle for the Face Magazine, 1995

David LaChapelle (born in 1963) is known for his over-the-top, unconventional portraits of famous people such Angelina Jolie, Kate Moss and Lady Gaga. Chapelle had photographed many bizarre pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio in the year 1995.

“I think Leo DiCaprio is still pissed off about posing with those bananas.” – David LaChapelle

In these pictures, Leonardo DiCaprio is seen giving quirky poses in some fashionable clothes from the 1990s. Leo is especially looking stunning in the brown leather jacket, white vest, and the t-shirt with a red bow.

Leonardo DiCaprio (born November 11, 1974), the popular actor of Hollywood who has proved his grit and love for his work as an actor in movies like Titanic, The Revenant, Catch Me If You Can, Inception, among others. DiCaprio has worked in almost all genres of films, but his romantic and thriller movies are most appreciated by the audiences and have also enjoyed massive collections in the box office. Apart from acting, the Great Gatsby star is also a well-known producer in Hollywood.

See more»

Victorian Fatherhood: Sweet Studio Photos of Men With Their Children in the 19th Century

Of all the characteristics attributed to defining Victorian male masculinity, the one least emphasized or spoken about was that of the Victorian man as a father. Little attention was directed to the role the Victorian man played as a father till the end of the period.

If the public and private spheres were defined by gender, then child-rearing fell under the domain of his wife; however, as domesticity revolved around the roles of both parents, parenting was defined as the Victorian man’s commitment to his home and the family unit. With both of these views in existence, the actual role of the Victorian man in the Victorian family unit was unclear.

The biggest change seen during the period was in the area of discipline. The Victorian male had the right to physically beat his children and/or servants, a demonstration of the ultimate power he had over his household. But as time went on, these attitudes began to change and in 1889 laws passed to prevent cruelty towards their children.

Children were a demanding part of the Victorian father’s emotional life. Children successfully raised in a good marriage brought the family stability and respect. While the role of fatherhood changed dramatically, it continued to affect his masculinity and how he saw himself.

Here is a set of sweet photos that shows portraits of Victorian fathers with their children from the 19th century.

See more»