1.6.11

Popular Photography

 
Hello all! I'm taking a lit bit of a break from tradition here, for the first post of the month.

This is a magazine I found at the ABC Comic Book Emporium here in Vancouver. The store itself deserves discussion on its own, but maybe another day. Although it isn't photography specific or anything, it's very cool if you like old junk or are interested in cultural memory. They have piles and piles of old books, comics, and magazines such as Popular Photography and American Cinematographer, which can be an endless source of entertainment.

When I found this magazine, the owner had just received a big collection of magazines from the 30s. This issue is from November 1938, when an image-rich mag was only 25 cents!

One of the reasons I love photography is that it preserves moments, memories, or whatever you want to call it. Okay, I know that goes without saying, but when I see a really old photograph I can't help but wonder what was going on in the world at that time, or what the subjects are thinking, or what they're going through. Such photos also serve as a reminder of how very human we have always been, and it can be very heartwarming.

Vintage magazines are fun to look at, both for this reason and because those old ads are a neat study in how graphic design has changed over the last 80 years.

Here are a few scans:
I like these images a lot, not only because they are good photos but also because this was the 30s! Just a few years later images like these would all but disappear from the mainstream, to be shamefully hidden away or to be marginalized as high art. Sometimes it's easy to forget that there was a much more easygoing outlook on representations of the human body before post-war conservatism set in. This page is a reminder that things may be more relaxed now than they were, but things are more the same than ever.

This is a familiar page... I'm pretty sure they still do this feature in modern photo magazines. What's interesting to me is that the things that people want to take pictures of are the same now as they were then, and the way people take pictures hasn't really changed either. Maybe years of watching movies and looking at photos has given us a grammar of how a picture should look, and maybe that grammar hasn't really changed. Maybe it's just instinctive! Another thing is that these people all look so human. They're not dolled up like movie stars and they look like they could be someone you know. The changes in fashion are pretty negligible and they look about the same as people do today.

Finally, I'm throwing in this Exacta ad purely because, since this was published in 1938, Ihagee was still operating and had not yet been blown up. Now they're ancient history, but really, none of this was that long ago.

That's all for now! Sorry for the slightly disjointed post. I hope it inspires you to think about years gone by.

Cheers,
Caity

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