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…
Who are these WWII black soldiers?
Posted in Photos
Tag: Photos
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…
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…
The pages of the photo album had been soiled by water, making them both coarse and puffy. The front and back covers were missing, and some photos had been deliberately cut out. It was lying in a glass…
Vintage photos of a well-to-do black family
Posted in Black history, and Photos
Were my eyes deceiving me, I wondered as I glanced at the group of photos lying in the bottom half of a small flat box on the auction table. A nicely dressed and coiffed black woman sitting in a…
Black images and America’s shameful past
Posted in civil rights movement, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and Photos
The images spoke their own evilness. Paul Robeson – one of the smartest and most talented men in the world – toting a bale of cotton, staggering out of a bar singing “Ol’ Man River”…
Buzz is still on story of ‘rare’ slave photo
Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, Photos, and slavery
Last week, questions were raised about what was described as a “rare” photo of two slave boys and the identity of the photographer who captured them. I wrote about the photo, too, out of curiosity. I’m an…
A story has been circulating over the last few days about a photo of two “slave” boys, one supposedly named John, found during an estate sale in North Carolina. The buyer was the collector Keya Morgan, whom…
Photos and the stories they do (or not) tell –
Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, Photos, and Postcards
As you know, I love old photos. I like to imagine the stories behind each one of them. Who were these people and what were their lives like? I don’t go out of my way…