The image appeared only for a fleeting moment. I was concentrating so hard on the photos that flashed on the screen in the Tuskegee Airmen documentary that I had almost missed it. But there he was…
Category: Photos
Who are these WWII black soldiers?
Posted in Photos
More than two years ago, I came across a black and white photo of African American soldiers from World War II whom I wanted to identify. A reader saw the photo and recognized one of the…
Philly’s first black trolley operators 1944
Posted in Black history, and Photos
The row of African American men in the black and white photo were a stark contrast to the dollar-store prints sitting on a rack at the auction house. They had the faces of proud men…
A mother’s poems of a son’s life
Posted in Photos
I see so many discarded photos at auction that I mindlessly flip through them, not expecting to find anything new. I’ve seen the studio portrait shots, the family on vacation shots and the Christmas shots.…
Don’t buy that photo, the man said jokingly over my shoulder. He was referring to a lovely and loving picture of three little African girls walking down a road towards us, all tight like best friends…
The auctioneer held up the bi-folded photo frame containing a vintage photo of a man and woman. $5, he said to us auction-goers standing in the driveway of a brick home where a thicket of…
The magazine-size book was tucked beneath a group of other papers. I found it because I always troll through ephemera at auction. For me, it’s like peeling back the layers of a mystery; I never know…
Discarding old college photos
Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and Photos
The photos in the album were stunning, not only in their execution but in the stories they told. These photos offered a slice of life at Nazareth College in the mid-1930s: A 1935 commencement of women…
Don’t throw away your family’s history
Posted in Black history, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and Photos
Dr. Diane Turner held up a small photo album containing the documents of an African American soldier who had served in World War I. She had found and bought it on eBay, and she was astounded.…
Postcards of black women with hats
Posted in Black history, Clothing, Photos, Postcards, and Style
In the auction catalog, the description of the postcards sounded a lot like “Crowns,” a book of photographs about black women and their love affair with hats: “Group of 275 real photo post cards of African…