Perhaps it’s natural, while looking at old photos, to wonder, “What ever happened to that person?” Every once in a while, through comments, tags, and notes in the Flickr Commons, we learn the answer. Score one for crowdsourcing!

One such mystery was solved recently. This lovely image of a girl using a sextant to calculate latitude is from the Library of Congress uploads. The photographer was Alfred T. Palmer; it was taken in Los Angeles on a cloudless day in September 1942. “Learning how to determine latitude by using a sextant is Senta Osoling, student at Polytechnic High School, Los Angeles, Calif. Navigation classes are part of the school’s program for training its students for specific contributions to the war effort” is the descriptive caption.

Learning how to determine latitude by using a sextant is Senta Osoling, student at Polytechnic High School, Los Angeles, Calif. Navigation classes are part of the school's program for training its students for specific contributions to the war effort (LOC)

So, who was Senta Osoling, and whatever happened to her?

Almost two years ago, I tracked down a scientific paper that she co-authored in 1949 — presumably, from the context, when she was a chemistry student (her co-author, Alfred Deutsch, was a graduate student in the department of chemistry at UCLA). The citation is:

Alfred Deutsch and Senta Osoling, “Conductimetric and Potentiometric Studies of the Stoichiometry and Equilibria of Boric Acid-Mannitol Complexes,” Journal of the American Chemical Society 71(5)( May 1949): 1637-1940.

So it’s not exactly a source for personal details. This week, a much better answer came from Flickr user robertvaldivia:

Lovely Senta is now Senta A. Raizen and she is the Director at The National Center for Improving Science Education in Washington, DC.

Raizen earned an MA at Bryn Mawr in 1945, and was a chemist at Sun Oil before moving into policy work. The link robertvaldivia left with this note shows a recent photo of Senta A. Raizen, and gives a summary of her impressive career in science education. And that impressive career apparently started with hands-on science learning when she was a high school student in Los Angeles during World War II.

A happy first year in the Commons to the National Library of New Zealand, who joined The Commons on Flickr on November 27, 2008. Since then, we’ve learned just how active in new ways of reaching out to users through technology the NLNZ is, with exciting projects like DigitalNZ. And check the magnifier on their front-page announcement about their December move – we users like some fun as well as a chance to contributte!

But here at Indicommons, our heart is with the NLNZ on Flickr, and here are some of the ways …

Panoramas

House and grounds of R H Edie, Edievale, Otago, between 1923-1928

Stereographs!

Photographer and assistant, with a camera, between 1902-1922

Celebration of the end of a war

New Zealand soldiers and civilians in London at the end of World War I, 1918

Views of Antarctica

Photographer: Herbert Ponting

… and all the people and places of New Zealand.

Wairoa Geyser, Whakarewarewa, 1908

Robert Louis Stevenson’s birthday party, at Vailima, ca 1893

Huge sunfish thrown up on beach at Awatuna, near Hokitika, ca 1910

Close-up view of a Port Chalmers wharf and ships loading, 1870s

On October 21, 2008, the Nationaal Archief and Spaarnestad Photo became the first Dutch heritage institutions to place a small selection of their photos on Flickr in The Commons. Within two weeks, the photostream of the Nationaal Archief had over 400,000 page views and 400 comments. These large numbers were caused by the extensive amount of attention the media dedicated to the initiative — resulting in, among other things, articles in national newspapers De Volkskrant and Het Parool, radio reporting by the Wereldomroep, and, most spectacular of all, a prime-time news item in NOS Journaal (causing page views to rise up to 100,000 in one night). This initiative was started as a pilot project to involve the broad audience in photographic collections and metadata generation. The pilot proved successful: with almost 2,000 comments and over 6,800 tags added, Nationaal Archief has incorporated the use of Flickr as a standard feature for public presentation and metadata generation.

Recently, Nationaal Archief has launched another Flickr pilot: Mapit1418.nl, an online tool aimed at collecting geographical metadata on a selection of photos from World War I. Partly thanks to The Commons, Nationaal Archief has gathered quite a lot of data on this collection, but for most of these photos the locations are unknown. With Mapit1418.nl, the archive seeks to research what significant role a geotagging game can play in adding specific knowledge to its collections.

Mapit1418.nl is a mashup of two data streams: a subset of Nationaal Archief’s Flickr photos and Open Street Map data. A new and simple website was developed as a game “shell” for the mashup. The game is simple: select a photo, study it, and add it to the (suspected) right location on the map, adding an “argument” for that location (”I recognize that bell tower in the background”) or even a photo of that same location today. Earlier locations can be overruled by every new player, but selection of the “right” location (some degree of uncertainty will always remain) is in hands of the jury: every month, from a pool of the most frequent players a jury selects a winner. He or she (we see an almost even distribution of men and women on the website) wins large reproduction of a WWI photo.

Up till now, some 50 locations have been added to the photos. Since we aim at WWI “knowledgeables”, discussion tends to develop around specific themes. Some users disagree about the origins of a certain war vessel — a phenomenon we love to observe and stongly encourage. Hopefully it will lead to a just location in the end …

www.mapit1418.nl (sorry, only in Dutch)
Open now until April 24, 2010

The Flickr Commons project lets us see the 19th-century beginnings of photography represented in a very 21st-century space. And among those early treasures, we have reminders that women were there at the very beginning, some of the first to embrace photography as an art and as a tool. Consider these four founding mothers:

Anna Atkins (1799-1871) is represented in the Commons by her Photographs of British Algae, found as a set in the New York Public Library’s Flickr stream. Atkins studied science as her father’s assistant and made illustrations of shells for his 1823 translation of Lamarck’s book on the subject. She collected botanical samples, and through both her father and her husband came to know William Fox Talbot, inventor of the negative/positive process. By about 1841 she had access to a camera, but she’s best known for her 1843-45 cyanotypes (sunprints) of algae specimens. She collaborated with another woman, Anne Dixon (1799-1864), on other albums of botanical cyanotypes.

Fucus nodosus (1843-53), New York Public Library

Mary Dillwyn (1816-1906) was also acquainted with William Fox Talbot through family networks: her older brother John Dillwyn Llewelyn (himself a photographer) married Talbot’s cousin Emma. Mary was using a small camera in the early 1850s, and made a specialty of rather informal portraits for the time. After she married a clergyman in 1857, she gave up photography. Her work is to be found in the LIGC-NLW (National Library of Wales) Flickr stream, including this self-portrait from 1853.

Mary Dillwyn M.D. 1853 [self-portrait], LIGC-NLW (National Library of Wales)

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), who was raised in India, only started taking pictures at age 48, in 1863, when someone gave her a camera as a gift. Through her sister, she knew Tennyson and other writers and artists, and drew from their work in her subjects and poses. Cameron was also forward-thinking enough to get each of her images registered with the copyright office. She continued to make photographs when she moved back to Ceylon in 1875, but it was hard to get the necessary supplies there. The George Eastman House and the National Media Museum Flickr streams both include examples of Cameron’s work.

Ophelia Study No. 2, 1867, George Eastman House

Baby “Pictet”, 1863, National Media Museum

Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake (1809-1893) wasn’t herself a photographer. She was an art critic who wrote one of the first and most influential essays about photography as an art form, in 1857, declaring that “[p]hotography is intended to supercede much that art has hitherto done, but only that which it was both a misappropriation and a deterioration of Art to do.” She was married to Sir Charles Eastlake, the first president of the Royal Photographic Society. A Hill and Adamson portrait of Lady Eastlake (an early subject of photography as well as an early supporter) c. 1845 can be found in the Flickr stream of the National Galleries of Scotland.

Hill and Adamson, Lady Elizabeth (Rigby) Eastlake, 1809-1893. Writer, c. 1845, National Galleries of Scotland

Wedding party

The Library of Virginia isn’t one of the bigger streams in the Commons, but their 400+ photos since joining the Commons on October 6, 2008, have a lot to say. They, with the State Library and Archives of Florida, represent the American South in the Commons. The bulk of Virginia’s collection is from the Adolph B. Rice Studio of Richmond, and documents 1950s Richmond, Virginia: buildings going up and falling down, beauty parlors and department stores, bowling teams and wedding parties — the regular life of regular people.

Who was Adolph B. Rice, anyway?

The Library of Virginia explains:

Born in 1909, Adolph Bransford Rice grew up in the Oregon Hill neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. The son of an elevator inspector, he originally worked as a mechanic for Otis Elevator. In the 1940s Rice briefly owned and operated a small family business known as the Rice Elevator and Engineering Company. He changed careers and became a professional photographer at the age of forty and established the Adolph B. Rice Studio at 14 N. Auburn Avenue….

Founded in 1949, the Adolph B. Rice Studio addressed a wide variety of photographic needs in Richmond, Virginia. It specialized in aerial and commercial photography and worked for nearly every major business and organization in the city during the 1950s. Clients included department stores, real estate developers, food service companies, television and radio broadcast companies, car dealerships, construction firms, and state and city governments. The resulting images document much of the growth and commercial development of the region in the mid-twentieth century.

Join us in wishing the Library of Virginia — and the people of Richmond, VA — a happy Commons anniversary!

Ball game

Lowes of Richmond, woman in bunny suit showing a stove

Bowling team

Le-Wood Homes prefab church

When she was photographed here, Mrs. Field was using a wicker wheelchair, pushed by the main standing behind her, apparently to tour the Bronx Zoo. Was Mrs. Field a wheelchair user?

Library of Congress

The answer isn’t obvious, because the zoo (like many zoos and other parks today) had wheelchairs for loan or rent. Notice the same model lined up behind Mrs. Gibson in this photo.

Library of Congress

Was this a common choice for tourists a century ago? The Commons has some tantalizing evidence that it may have been. Meet Madame Gardriol:

Bibliotheque de Toulouse

Another matron on holiday — this time, at a spa town in the Pyrenees. Her chair model is different, but again there’s a man pushing her and an umbrella handy for shade. Two could be a coincidence … are there other telltale images in the Commons? Look at this one, from the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893:

Brooklyn Museum

Flickr user Rob Ketcherside added a note marking the two people on the lower right of the photo, just below the pillars — that’s a man pushing a woman in a wicker wheelchair.

Wicker was, indeed, a common material for wheelchairs in everyday use, not just by tourists. Wicker wheelchairs are sometimes sold today as antiques (not hard to find online), and well into the 1930s wicker was considered a stylish, comfortable design element.

Walking in heeled shoes, in a corset, in heavy skirts and layers, balancing an impressive hat, as women of the era did, was no easy trick; for some, it was simply impossible to sustain for long periods. If Mrs. Field, Mme. Gardriol, and the Exposition-goer wanted to see the sights and dress like their peers, and they could afford to hire a chair, wheels were one realistic option.

Who are the men behind the chairs? These models are built to be pushed by a second person (not self-propelled). Were the men hired with the chairs? Or were they family, friends, longtime employees?

Whether or not these women were using the chairs as a temporary convenience or an everyday necessity, the spaces they traveled might reasonably have accommodated such conveyances, especially if the zoo, spa, or fair provided the chairs in the first place. How well? Were the pathways were smooth, the entrances to indoor exhibits wide, and the inclines gentle? If so, maybe the history of wheelchair accessibility in public spaces extends further back than the familiar symbols and features of recent decades.

Today, we celebrate the one year anniversary of the National Media Museum’s induction into the Flickr Commons! The National Media Museum is located in Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK. It is “devoted to film, photography, television, radio and the web.”

The National Photography Collection held at the Museum is one of the finest and most extensive anywhere in the world. It encompasses many significant groups of material, including the Science Museum’s Photography Collection, The Royal Photographic Society Collection, the holdings of the former Kodak Museum and the picture library of the former Daily Herald newspaper.

Their most popular set on Flickr contains spirit photographs by William Hope. Hope was a medium who founded a group comprised of six spirit photographers known as the “Crewe Circle.”

The spirit photographs of William Hope

When Hope was exposed as a fraudster, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle remained a loyal supporter of his.

The spirit photographs of William Hope

Another popular set contains charming circular Kodak snapsnots from the late 1800s. The introduction of the Kodak camera revolutionized photography by virtue of how easy it suddenly became to capture memories.

Kodak No.1 Circular Snapshot

A unique set of 20 photogravures from Peter Henry Emerson, again late 1800s, illustrates the rich historical archives that the NMeM shares through its Flickr photostream.

Peter Henry Emerson – Images from ‘Pictures From Life in Field and Fen’

Another beautiful photograph from this set demonstrates the power of the Commons; a commenter was able to supply location data for this image.

Peter Henry Emerson – Images from ‘Pictures From Life in Field and Fen’

Another favorite set includes images from Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, a book we covered in detail earlier on this blog.

Human Expressions

Last, a fun set they were inspired to create from an exhibit they held on anthromorphology! The National Media Museum: diverse, humorous, and engaging. HAPPY COMMONSVERSARY!

Snapping Dogs

Among the richest collections in the Commons is that of the Biblioteca de Arte of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, Portugal.  And it’s my particular pleasure to make that collection somewhat better on known on the first anniversary of the Gulbenkian’s joining the Commons. In the last year, the Library of Art has uploaded

• 4,345 photos (as of August 11), with new ones added almost daily,
• in 168 sets (almost as many as I have!),
• gathered into 7 themed collections that show the breadth and specialization of this collection.

At the core of the Gulbenkian on the Commons are two collections of photographs from two studios: Mário Novais and Horácio Novais. Both men photographed their times and their surroundings, and though individual photos are not always dated, their rich visual content suggests their times.

Horacio, the younger, focused – or so the Gulbenkian’s Commons collection of his work suggests – on the city of Lisbon and the times he lived in.

Mocidade Portuguesa

Among these images are some of great historical importance, capturing the 1931 revolts against the Salazar dictatorship.

Revolta de 26 de Agosto de 1931 em Lisboa

Mário, the elder, focused, in this selection of his work, on photographs of particular events and installations, but also on transportation, institutions, and (as we’ll see later) on the built world around him.

Exposição Henriquina, Lisboa, 1960

Much of the work of his studio over its 50 years was clearly done on commission, so that it shows a breadth of the national interest, not only his own.

Edifícios industriais

Equally important to the focus on these two remarkable – and related – 20th-century Lisbon studios are the architectural and design collections published in the Commons by the Art Library.

The first of these collections is a selection of an extensive 1960s survey of Portuguese, in black and white and in color, by João Miguel dos Santos Simões, for the Foundation’s own reference work Corpus da azulejaria portuguesa.

Azulejaria Portuguesa (Portuguese Tiles)

A second collection focuses on landscape architecture – the work of the first generation of Portuguese landscape architects, in the mid-20th century, including architect Francisco Caldeira Cabral.

Setúbal

And, most especially, the Gulbenkian continues to amass in the Commons an extraordinary collection of images of Portuguese Gothic architecture.

Concelho de Elvas

This photographic survey of 410 black and white prints from the 1950s, from the studio of Mário Novais, depicts exterior and interior views and decorative details of the heights of medieval building in Portugal.

Concelho de Beja

If you have not found these photos in your searches of the Commons, perhaps it is because few have received the attention in tagging that most accounts based in English-speaking countries have. If you have an interest in European history, in museum collections, in architecture, or in Portugal itself, please consider taking a few minutes of your time to make these photographs more easily accessed by others, or to tell a friend or colleague who speaks Portuguese about them.

And to the Foundation itself … Happy Commonsversary!

Because the Bain Collection of uploads from the Library of Congress involves news photos of the 1910s, some of the photos shine a flashlight on long-forgotten crime investigations. Sensational coverage is hardly a recent phenomenon.

The case of Dorcas Snodgrass is a good example; links to the New York Times articles about her disappearance were added to the image of Snodgrass by Flickr user whyaduck. Following them, we learn why the unfortunate young nursing student’s photo is part of the Commons now, between athlete Jim Thorpe and a notorious opium dealer in the stream of newsmakers.

Bain News Service
Dorcas Snodgrass, 1910-1912
Library of Congress: LC-B2- 2566-2

Miss Dorcas Iyams “Doc” Snodgrass, age 26, was reported missing from Mount Vernon, New York, in July 1912, by her brother-in-law John L. Crider. Snodgrass was 5′6″, about 135 lbs. She was recently engaged to an F. Eugene Schmidt, lived with her sister and brother-in-law, and said she was going shopping in New York City when last seen boarding a train. The Criders, Schmidt, and Snodgrass were planning to move to California together soon. Her sister insisted:

Dorcas was not the kind of girl to run away.

But, on the other hand, her sister considered Dorcas “temporarily deranged” by a bad headache the day she left. Dorcas’s brother, Edward Snodgrass of Virginia, posted a $500 reward for information.

On Sunday, 28 July 1912, the body of Dorcas Snodgrass was recovered, spotted by canoeists on the banks of a creek near Catskill, NY. Rivermen said she couldn’t have fallen or jumped from a boat elsewhere and washed ashore there. She was still wearing her corset (with the name “D. Snodgrass” on it), her watch, and her engagement ring. Her hat and hatpins were found in the marshes nearby.

The sister speculated that Dorcas took the wrong train (in her “derangement”) and became upset enough to commit suicide, or maybe she only stumbled into the creek by accident. Officials concurred, and the death was quickly pronounced a likely suicide. Within days of the body’s discovery, Mr. and Mrs. Crider moved to Oakland CA as previously arranged. They did not attend the funeral of Miss Snodgrass in West Virginia; nor did her fiance, Mr. Schmidt.

Perhaps because of this hasty resolution, the story continues to fascinate (haunt?) Flickr Commons visitors. Flickr user Right Brain touched up the image. Liana’s Paper Doll Blog posted a paper doll nurses’ uniform based on Dorcas’s student costume; Laura Moncur also made a blog post about the image. Almost a hundred years after her story flickered through the newspapers, her image on Flickr stands as a memorial to this young woman’s brief life, and a gathering point for speculation about her untimely end.

One of my favorite sets in The Commons is the New York Public Library’s Japan / Kusakabe Kimbei, one hundred hand-colored albumen prints from around the 1880s. It covers a wide range of classic tourist scenes of Japan, and has provided me long hours of research entertainment since last December when the NYPL joined the Flickr Commons. On a recent trip to Tokyo I was happy to upload a few more photos of the scenes “now,” and excitedly visited an exhibition of a Kimbei album held by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

Travel photography spread out from Europe in the mid-1800s, reaching Japan with the arrival of Felice Beato in 1863. Beato leveraged highly skilled colorists from Japan’s domestic printing and advertising industry to add life to his black and white prints, creating works of art unique from other parts of the world. His apprentices spun off their own studios. One of these was Kusakabe Kimbei, who opened up shop in 1881. Within a few years, Kusakabe had a large array of photographs available by catalog: individually or in large, lacquer-bound volumes. The volumes offered a sampling of scenes from around Japan. These volumes remain in private and museum collections around the world, and NYPL has a fine example.

Added to Flickr Commons, NYPL’s uniquely provide a great public window on Japanese tourism history. They were taken at popular travel destinations such as Nikko or Kyoto, in remote locations along the Tokaido road, and in and around the foreign settlement at Yokohama. With a bit of web searching and cross-referencing — especially with the wonderfully annotated collection at Nagasaki University — more precise dates and locations can be provided for many of the photographs, and they can moreover be understood in context with each other.

For example, this photo of the Grand Hotel on Yokohama’s waterfront:

The clues in online archives at Nagasaki University and the University of Washington, as well as photos hosted by Mitsubishi Electric and the Kanagawa Museum of Cultural History, send the camera spinning around the hotel and up the canal over a span of years. Finally, this leads to not only the location of the hotel, which is described on many Japanese sites, but to the actual positioning of the camera in the NYPL photo.

It’s a treacherous sport that can take several hours per photograph, but is rewarding more often than not. Recently a commenter in one Yokohama photograph wondered where it might have been taken. A quick look at a David Rumsey map of Yokohama and a Nagasaki University image provided the name of the bridge in the photo. Back and forth with other folks on Flickr leads to an understanding of where to take the photo today, and what it might look like.

Creating a “now and then” coupling of photos is truly satisfying, and always educational. Hunting down a photo that someone else has taken is great fun. But the true way to honor these travel photographs is to visit the spots yourself, and perhaps take a “now” shot, as I discovered this on a recent trip to Tokyo:

(This one’s not a Kusakabe photograph.)

The discussion of the Yokohama photo happened after I got back, so it’s on the list to visit next time.

Coincidentally, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography is running a series of exhibits this summer titled Traveling Photography (Tabi suru Shashin). The first installment features, among other images, 50 Kusakabe Kimbei prints from an album in the museum’s collection. I thought it would be nice to see them in person and look for images I recognize from NYPL, Nagasaki, and other collections. What I didn’t expect, though, was how utterly stunning they look. Compared with scanned, digital copies, the beauty of museum’s physical artifacts was brilliant. They shimmered with life, and their colors had a luminosity missing from normal developed film, and certainly from reproductions made for the exhibit book and even the hard-bound biography printed in 2006.

Now I’m hungry for more, and I hope everyone else is too. I’d love to see a traveling exhibit of Japanese travel photography, akin to the one in Tokyo but paired with “Now” photos from Flickr (I volunteer to take missing photographs, if there’s grant money lying around). It would feature holdings by many institutions — among Flickr Commons participants, at least George Eastman House, the Smithsonian, and the NYPL hold Kimbei photographs, and more likely have other old photos of Japan like the NYPL’s. These works of art need to get on the road, and be gawked at as they were originally intended!