Read the Back of your Photos (and Do NOT Leave the Stove On) Vernacular Photography of the Disaster Kind

We just "celebrated" the 30th anniversary of a killer tornado here in Michigan, the Kalamazoo doozy in which four folks lost their lives. The entire downtown area was destroyed, and I lived through it. It was the last house I lived in before moving to NYC, and I'll always remember sitting on the porch, drinking beer, ignoring warning sirens, and watching a poor soul drive up to the house on four flat tires, his arm covered in blood, to say "I just drove through a tornado" while shaking his head and trying to clear his ears. We didn't hear the typical "train sound" so often used by survivors, but the path was less than a mile away.

I was expecting this group of five disaster photos to be more evidence of a tornado. Lo and behold one has a barely legible note on the reverse which reads "Explosion at old Gilmore house" and sure enough...the offending stove is shown in one photo. Since these photos pre-date meth labs by a good hundred years, I am going to blame a gas line and hope no one was home. These would typically be called "exterior" and "interior" photographs, but the explosion has blurred those distinctions considerably.

Set of Original Anonymous "Disaster" photographs, circa 1910 Collection Jim Linderman

Expect a major announcement of photographic interest this week. Stay Tuned!

Literally a Dog and Pony Show (at the Circus in Black and White #19)

Today "Dog and Pony Show" is a phrase used when tricking prospective customers with bedazzling graphics and such. It used to mean what is shown above.

Number 19 in the "At the Circus in Black and White" series.

Untitled Anonymous Snapshot, circa 1920 Collection Jim Linderman

Takejiro Hasegawa and the Crepe Paper Fairy Tales

There are many beautiful and delicate things in the world. but among the most beautiful and delicate are the 19th century Japanese Crepe Paper books produced by Tikejiro Hasegawa. They hardly weigh a thing, which likely helped ship and carry them to the United States back in 1885 when they were first being made. While they are in fact extraordinary Japanese traditional woodcuts prints, each page done by hand, they were produced largely for the western market as souvenirs, but more. Seldom has such attention been paid to mere exports, and I suspect not only the extremely high artistic standards of the artist, but the desire to share same with the rest of the world was just as important as profit.
Takejiro Hasegawa was born in 1853 and lived until 1938, thus just missing the Second World War. The books were printed in quite small editions, some 400 copies, so are quite scarce and highly prized today. He first intended the books to help educate Japanese children in the speaking of English, but as they caught on with travelers he had found his true market. Despite being (almost) strong enough to withstand children's play, the "Chirimen bon" crepe paper he printed on was light as a feather.
These selected images are from but a few in the 66 page book "Japanese Jingles" from 1891 which I proudly own. The books were in fact printed on crepe...a light as air paper fabric...hand sewn and bound. Mine is 5" x 6" in size and nearly an inch thick. The entire book is reproduced HERE.


Japanese Jingles: Being a Few Little Verses... by Mae St. john Bramhall, Published T. Hasegawa 1891 Collection Jim Linderman


With this post, I am taking a break to finish up another Dull Tool Dim Bulb Press book. More details will emerge soon...keep following!

Jim Linderman

One Way to Illustrate the Only One Way

Spiritual sisters with purloined street signs point to the source of their inspiration.

(Also posted on Old Time Religion blog)

Anonymous snapshot circa 1925 Collection Jim Linderman

Orchestral Maneuvers of the THEY SUCK Kind? Well...Take Off Your Skin and Dance in Your Bones!

I have learned after many years never to say a certain type of music sucks...because I always find myself later studying it and loving it. It happened with jazz...HATED it, then discovered Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. It happened with Country...HATED it, then the appreciation of it literally filled my life. Blues? The same three chords...then I discovered Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and that deep, rich, well of music which has sustained me for a lifetime. Gospel? Please...now I love it and have barely scratched (pun intended) the surface.

But you know? I don't think I'll EVER get into these guys. Hey, wait a minute! Dan Russo and his Orioles Orchestra recorded a song titled "Taint No Sin (To Take Off Your Skin And Dance Around In Your Bones)" Maybe I should just give a listen...


Collection of Gig announcement and Radio show Promotional real photo post cards all circa 1930-1935. Collection Jim Linderman

Do You Tumblr? I Do. The Frontier of Photography.

Do you Tumblr? I do. HERE. I use it to try out ideas for my blogs, for the instant feedback, for the way selected images reveal much about the folks who post them, for the inspiration and mostly as a way to generate interest in my own particular taste. More than anything, I use it to promote my books. It doesn't work, as most of my fellow tumblrs seem to be as broke as me, and besides are young and I doubt they even read books much. No insult, just that they are visual, busy, involved and living their lives, but they are also, at least my followers, extremely intelligent, artistic and many with curatorial skills which would match those of the professionals.


It is a very intimate and personal forum...nothing reveals more about a person than the visual images they love and select to share. Graphics, Art, Homemade art, Photographs they have collected OR taken, some stolen from others. It is a frontier for photos. For the most part, I consider my tumblr posts outtakes. B-sides. Things I have or have found which I believe deserve sharing, but not necessarily interesting enough for me to ponder for long...but I've been convinced otherwise on occasion.


The beauty of Tumblr is that others indicate their interest or appreciation of the image by voting, by forwarding it or by responding in some way. The genius of tumblr is the instant reinforcement for your own taste. A community builds...my community probably says more about me than them, but the misfits who follow me, most of them anonymous, have my support. If they post an image which offends me (and some frequently do) I "unfollow" them. If one of my posts receives a plethora of approvals, I'll consider expanding it and put it on a blog. Above is a selection of my recent posts on Tumblr. You can follow too if you like. Many duplicate (or lead to) posts on what I consider my REAL blogs. But if you like pictures without my blathering, this could be the place for you.

Group of anonymous photographs from the collection of Jim Linderman All Tumbled at some time.

Jimmy Donley Talented Tortured and Tormented Swamp Pop

Prostitutes, knives, sexual abuse, mental illness, suicide, alcoholism, attempted murder, wife-beating and an ill-fated decision to sell the rights to his songs to the crooked preacher Charles Jessup HERE) all add up to one damn good reason to BUY A CD instead of downloading some songs.

I swear, there is no way a tiny digital impulse which costs 99 cents and hurts your ears because the sound is so bad can even BEGIN to compare with a real CD and a real BOOK of liner notes, and the Jimmy Donley CD from the incredible Bear Records label in Germany is not the only reason, but it is a good one.

I can't even do justice to the disc, the liner notes, or the simply hard to believe story which unfolds as you listen. Suffice to say if you still own a CD player, this belongs. I've been a big fan of Swamp Pop for a long time, it is one of the last vestiges of a music junkie, and it has been on my mind even more since British Petroleum broke the Gulf with misguided greed and a rush to profit.

Swamp Pop comes from the same place now being gobbed with oil, and that the area just to the south of New Orleans has made a musical contribution equal to their cooking should not escape anyone. Like Bobby Charles, who I have also profiled here, Donley got some songs into the hands of Fats Domino, yet another reason to be glad to be alive...and if you know that beat and rhythm, you can begin to understand swamp pop. This would be a good CD for you to start with, and after you have read the simply incredible 40 page story included with the disc, if you don't have second thoughts about all that money you're electronically transferring directly to Apple...then I give up.

FIVE CAJUN STARS *****

Jimmy Donley The Shape You Left Me In Bear Records 2010 1 CD and 42 pages of text. Linked at right. BUY

The Ventriloquist who refused to be a Stripper

Here is a sordid little tale from the annals of talking dummys. According to the information on the reverse of this press photograph from 1937, "She didn't mind traveling about the country gypsy-like when Ellis K. Short, her husband, quit his bank job, Mrs. Annabelle Short testified in court yesterday. But when he ordered her to work as a strip-tease dancer she quit him, according to her testimony. Photo shows Mrs. Annabelle Short, who is a ventriloquist, with her dummy, after judge Charles has granted her a divorce." There is no quote reported from the dummy (or "vent figure" as they are properly called)

Original Press Photograph 1937 Collection Jim Linderman

Handmade Book of Crap! The Homemade Book of Useful Information

A homemade trove of useful useless information! Constructed by an eccentric somebody from Cleveland around 1920, there are nearly 50 pages of teriffic tidbits clipped and glued in this used composition book. As blank pages towards the end ran out, maker started to panic and began layering them, so there are leaves and leaves of true facts, one over the other. Gifted by my dear friend Anne, a long lost but now found friend who has retained the charm and beauty of a high school sweetheart.

The world's largest tree? Who invented the parachute? The size of Lincoln's Hat? How much would a million dollars weigh? It is all here, in glorious yellowing newsprint. When a newspaper couldn't fill in all the spaces, the call would go out for a few of these little tidbits. And what would that call be?

Jay Thorwaldson, a long-time member of a printing family, wrote the following to describe these little filler items: "Galleys of short "filler" items—such as a paragraph telling how many llamas there are in Peru—would be kept on hand to fill up small spaces at the bottom of stories. These items were also called "crap," clearly a double-meaning word that came to be synonymous with "filler." Thus, when a printer said someone’s head was "full of crap" it could be a compliment of sorts, meaning the person knew a lot of miscellaneous facts" They would be inserted, glazed over and forgotten. Except for our obsessive bookmaker, who seemingly created the first of the successful "Bathroom Reader" series.

As the newspaper continues to wither, it is increasingly unlikely we will hear anyone scream "I need four inches of crap" but facts are facts, and if you need to know where Jefferson Davis was born or the full first name of Baseball player Ty Cobb, I can tell you.

Useful Information circa 1920

The Invention of the Dashboard Camera Art Crime and Photography

By Jim Linderman from Dull Tool Dim Bulb
The mounted dashboard camera, as we all know from “America’s most horrible ruckus” on the flat screen, is de rigueur today for every cop car. Sideswipes, weaving drunks, runaway crackheads…we see them all through the electronic eye of the police car windshield. But did you know the apparatus was invented by a Weegee like ambulance chaser named Mell Kilpatrick who took accident photos for Los Angeles Newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s?

Mell Kilpatrick was a self-taught master photographer with Weegee skill and fortitude. In fact, the precious few times his name is mentioned, Weegee’s often follows. 

Living in Orange County when it was literally a county of oranges, Mell was attracted to photography young and certainly had the right eye. In the only photo I’ve found of him, he is posing as if squinting into a lens finder. Like a Weegee in sunshine, he traveled light…camera, flash, tripod and a trench coat when the road was slick. But he also had a camera mounted on his dashboard pointing through the windshield These photos were shot with it. Like a hard-boiled P.O, whenever California blood was spilled, he was there. Crime, Crash, Insurance Fraud…he squinted through them all in black and white. A James Ellroy with a speed graphic camera and a police-band radio. 

Mell is probably best known for the iconic photo “It’s lucky when you live in America” which depicts a car overturned in a field after having crashed through a billboard advertising a mountain fresh brand of beer. These photos of Mell’s skid marks, so to speak, are mild compared to the gruesome carnage shown in his work (and which should be shown to every driver using their cellphone)

In an extraordinary article which draws comparisons with the car crash silkscreens of Andy Warhol and the car crash fetishists of J. G. Ballard, writer Nathan Callahan attributes Kilpatrick’s vision to those he saw while working as a projectionist at the Laguna and Balboa Theaters in the late 1940′s, where he watched film noir masterpieces while waiting to change the reels. He learned well and got used to the dark. All these photos have his identification stamp or notes, but only one provides the time: 5 am.

Kilpatrick’s negative collection, well organized and labeled, sat for 35 years until being turned up by photography collector and dealer Jennifer Dumas. She compiled them into a coffee table book “Car Crashes & Other Sad Stories” in 2000 published by Taschen, linked below.

Remarkably, there was another side to Mell. As Orange County turned into Disneyland (literally) Mell turned his camera to the construction. Soon he was loaning his darkroom to other Disney photographers, and Uncle Walt himself granted him full access to the construction site. Mell’s granddaughter has published no less than five books of his early Disneyland photographs. As Callahan reports, she “sold the most gruesome ones…they brought a bad vibe to the house.”

Forensic Photography would seem to be a growth industry, what with all the teenage texting going on at 75 MPH. It was probably a good gig for Mell…even if most of them seem to have been taken at 5:00 AM.

Original Accident Scene Photograph by Mell Kilpatrick circa 1952-1953 Collection Jim Linderman 

Black Herman and Robert Johnson Hoodoo Voodoo Mumbo Jumbo Magic Spells Charms Death and the Grave

Robert Johnson would have been 102  today, some say. Johnson's music was seeped in voodoo, hoodoo, black magic, spells, charms and the devil. There is only one thing wrong with Robert Johnson's music...there won't be any more. The last missing track, version two of "Traveling Riverside Blues" turned up in 1998. Where did his mumbo-jumbo imagery come from? Maybe from Black Herman.

One of the most obscure folks in history, and one of the few African-American magicians I can think of, died in 1934 just two years before Johnson made his recordings.
Actually, Black Herman died MANY times as it was a regular part of his act.

Black Herman was Benjamin Herman Rucker. I don't know if he is related to Darius Rucker, A.K.A "Hootie" or "Blowfish" but with genetic testing we might be able to find out. Herman did the medicine show routes and sold an African tonic. Like most tonics of the time, pretty much all alcohol. He abandoned that ruse as his magic skills increased, and soon he was performing numerous conjuring tricks which included, most notably, his own death. For a big finish, Herman would be buried alive and placed in "Black Herman's Private Graveyard" from which he would miraculously reappear THREE DAYS LATER and continue his act. There was just one problem. One day Black Herman died for REAL.

Some folks even claimed he died on stage and everyone thought it was part of the act, but this has been shown to be false. He just croaked. But that still wasn't the end of the act. His assistant charged admission to the viewing in the funeral home, where paying customers were allowed to poke Black Herman with a stick.
The above is an advertisement for his only book, appropriately "ghost-written" titled "Amazing Secrets of Black Herman" which appeared long after his death in a 1943 pulp magazine...the October 1943 issue of "Gay Love." (A magazine title which should be resurrected today like Herman) A similar ad, with a drawing of Herman decked out in his turban appears in the April 29, 1939 issue of The Afro-American, so someone was still making money on him long after he croaked...just like Robert Johnson!

Herman has a Wiki entry, but the best historical examination by far is on the Magic Tricks site HERE. And how could you NOT want to read more.

Black Herman Ad from Gay Love Stories October 1943 Collection Jim Linderman

SEE ALSO BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR HERE

Make-Do Love Coloring Book "Value Added" Pulp

A Make-do coloring book created from a "Love Fiction Monthly" pulp magazine from July 1942. Every lip quivering story has been embellished by hand. I suspect the hand of the little sister, and I also suspect the volume has been rendered valueless to a REAL Pulp Fiction collector, but to me, this makes the steamy tales all that better.


Hand Colored Love Fiction Monthly July 1942 Collection Jim Linderman