old photo

[Doug Bernhardt]

This photo was forwarded to me by Mr. Oatis several weeks ago....
http://www.shorpy.com/Hiawatha_Temple
is another of the great photos from shorpy. They have large sections of pictures tinted in photoshop by folks just for the sake/love of doing it. You could easily spend an hour just scrolling through all the signs here.

[erik winkler]

That is magnificent. How great is that?
The colors really... well... color it, as the street is alive...
Thanks for the link.

Erik

[Lee Littlewood]

Yup, I too have been rolling in the Shorpy archives. There are some wonderful signs here and there, and in very hi-rez. But the only way to really go through it would be to split up the dates and have everyone do a couple of months, then post a list of what they think are good. Is anybody interested?
(Robare, you seem to have gone through the Pathé archives, do you have a Shorpy checklist going?)

Here are some little bits from pictures I have seen:

doughnuts1925a.tiff (498.45 KiB) Viewed 3893 times

Hatlanta 1864a.tiff (513.69 KiB) Viewed 3894 times

Check out the giant hat, and the horse's head (a saddlery?). And on the right corner some painted letters

Hatlanta 1864b.tiff (140.08 KiB) Viewed 3893 times

complete with painted returns and shadows, as good as they were doing in London. This is Atlanta, GA, 1864.

[Lee Littlewood]

Hmmm, I can't see any pictures here. I uploaded them as tiffs, maybe there is a problem?

Here as jpegs:

doughnuts1925a.jpg (115.53 KiB) Viewed 3921 times

Hatlanta 1864.jpg (131.33 KiB) Viewed 3922 times

Hatlanta 1864b.jpg (35.34 KiB) Viewed 3901 times

[BruceJackson]

wow. This is really extraordinary. It really takes you straight into a world 100 years ago. Seeing these old streetscapes them in black and white is great, but seeing color....you suddenly realize the scale of the industry doing hand-crafted and gilded signs. The entire ambience of the city and especially the mercantile sector is dominated my hand-crafted signs

So much has been lost. Here is proof of an cultural and artistic epoch built around the art of the sign. Highly visible to all with wide recognition and appreciation by both business owners and the general public.

How can it be that these days, after only a couple of generations, most people have no knowledge or understanding of it's place in history, have never seen anyone hand-lettering and wouldn't recognize gold leaf if they fell over it? How sad that our cultural institutions and musuems have mostly ignored out art. Compared to other less significant art movements, it has been virtually ignored. It has hardly been studied, analyzed by researchers, discussed or protected.

At least through these photos, we can have a real understanding of the tradition we are building upon.