Flickr Commons / Discuss

Rob Ketcherside    says:

@BigBean, thanks for setting this up!

Hopefully it leads to more discussion of the collections!

My first research and comments were on Japan-related photos of the Library of Congress. (I was fresh back from Tokyo).

Japan (Waseda Ball Team) in N.Y. 4th of July Parade (LOC)

Jayel Aheram    says:

Oh sweet!

Okay. I am completely blown away by these series of images of Ruth St. Denis that belongs to the New York Public LIbrary.

flickr.com/photos/nypl/tags/ruthstdenis

I wanted to find out more about her and it turns out, there is plenty of information about her.

Ruth Dennis was born on a farm in rural New Jersey. Sources place her birth date variously at 1877, 1878, 1879, and 1880. The daughter of a strong-willed and highly educated woman (Ruth Emma Dennis was a physician by training), St. Denis was encouraged to study dance from an early age. Her early training included Delsarte technique, ballet lessons with the Italian ballerina Maria Bonfante, and popular social dance forms. Ruth began her professional career in New York City in 1892, where she worked in a dime museum and in vaudeville houses as a "skirt dancer", a female dancer whose legs were visible under her short skirt. St. Denis was probably required to perform her dance routine as many as eleven times a day.

Continue reading...

Brooklyn Museum    says:

Jayel, not sure if you saw this response we uploaded about her?

Roketpad, take a look at this photo comment added to one of our Chicago pics. Not sure if you or anyone here would be interested in helping solve this mystery, but wanted to point it in your direction just in case it piques your interest.

~shelley
Posted 42 months ago. (permalink)

Jayel Aheram    says:

Gasp! No, I did not. Ooh, how exciting.

I am trying to find archival footage of Ruth St. Denis. Is there none? :\
Posted 42 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

Shelley, got a bit of an answer!
Posted 42 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

My first act in The Commons was to search for "Japan". Besides the Waseda U baseballers, this one jumped out at me from the Library of Congress:

"Meiji Maru" ashore after typhoon in Japan (LOC)

Brooklyn Museum    says:

roketpad - you are awesome. i was just showing the group off to the folks in our libraries and archives. we were talking about how the folks in this group may be able to help *us* find difficult answers via this thread....and boom, you just did it (and really fast, too). thank you!!! ~shelley
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

@shelley- Thanks for all the compliments! That one just took a purposeful search engine query. :)
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

BigBean says:

yeah, Rob- these little mini projects of yours really rock!
Originally posted 41 months ago. (permalink)
BigBean edited this topic 41 months ago.

Rob Ketcherside    says:

@BigBean, glad you're liking them!

Here's a more recent find. This one was fun and easy.

Main Street, Tokio

Rob Ketcherside    says:

One day I decided to see how many "Now & Then" photos for the Kusakabe prints I could get before running out of energy.

1st Gate-Rock Nakanotake Miogi

j neuberger    says:

The photograph is dominated by a church and monastery with an interesting history.

Rob Ketcherside    says:

@j_neuberger: Awesome! That's great personal backstory. Where have you found the most information on Cusseau-Falviens? I see that MOMA has a folder of some sort of biographical material. Other than that, simple reference queries come up empty!
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago has gained some popularity recently because of the great non-fiction narrative Devil in the White City. With that in mind...

World's Columbian Exposition: Ferris Wheel, Chicago, United States, 1893.

j neuberger    says:

@roketpad--thanks. glad you found it interesting.
I haven't found any information on Chusseau-Flaviens except what's on the Eastman house website. There must be more be more out there but probably in real (not virtual!) archives, or maybe on French websites.
Jay
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

I struck the mother load today! Both date and place for a photo missing those captions!

Suffrage hikers on way to Wash. (LOC)

BigBean says:

wow, Rob!

I love the notes you added to the photo, and that you managed to identify one of the women hikers in one of the LOC's other photos!
Very cool.

Rosalie Jones & Ida Craft - suffrage hikers (LOC)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

Thanks Anna! I love the LOC photos of the suffrage hike and suffrage march. Great street scenes, great characters, great story.
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Barbara (LOC P&P) says:

Great sleuthing! I share the enthusiasm for the suffrage photos and the story behind them. Here's another in the Bain set than appears to have been made during the hike to Washington--admired by one commenter for the relaxed good humor the hikers' faces seem to express: www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/3102052125/

In responding to the comments, I took the opportunity to provide a link to a well-illustrated essay (in part, thanks to the Bain photos) about the 1913 march on the Library of Congress site: memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/aw01e/aw01e.html
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

@Barbara, thank you! And thank you so much for putting the photos up and monitoring commentsl

Here's some fly-weight research.

Jim Flynn, Tommy Ryan (LOC)

Lú_    says:

roketpad wrote

My first research and comments were on Japan-related photos of the Library of Congress. (I was fresh back from Tokyo).

Japan (Waseda Ball Team) in N.Y. 4th of July Parade (LOC)
Japan (Waseda Ball Team) in N.Y. 4th of July Parade (LOC) by The Library of Congress

Trapac    says:

Error 404 coming up for that link at the moment tho' :(
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Lú_    says:

Fixed :)
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Trapac    says:

:)
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Trapac    says:

Love the commentary underneath that blog entry, just amazing to see the power of information sharing and who might pop up from 'nowhere', with another piece of the puzzle....
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

The Other Pete    says:

I saw this shot of Abraham Walkowitz in the Smithsonian's stream:

Rob Ketcherside    says:

Pete: You're just passionate ;) That's awesome.

(I reuse varieties of this line all of the time, stolen from National Treasure... What's one step below crazy?.. obsessed?.. no, passionate!)

My latest "passion" is to identify the buildings in the Smithsonian and Brooklyn Museum 1893 World's Columbian Exposition... more on that later.
Originally posted 41 months ago. (permalink)
Rob Ketcherside edited this topic 41 months ago.

Rob Ketcherside    says:

Right, so remember up there I talked about seeing America's first serial killer from the Ferris Wheel?

Well, here's the view the other way.

Lú_    says:

roketpad wrote

The surprising answer was that there were two Irish Villages, within a stone's throw from each other. One had a Blarney Castle replica, and one had a half-scale Donegal Castle.

Brooklyn Museum    says:

Hey Rob, I posted a response here. Just wanted to make sure you saw it. Shelley
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

Thanks! As I was going through, I couldn't figure out if I should be tagging the same things I was noting. Any opinions?

And is there any taboos against adding hyperlinks in notes?
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Trapac    says:

"British Coal strike - Llwynpia, So. Wales. A Colliery Village. (LOC)" by library_of_congress [?]


This image captured my imagination, because of my own Welsh heritage, it's been amazing what I've been able to find out this afternoon, with just a little digging around online....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The owner of the Glamorgan coalmines, (who is described variously as a mining engineer and entrepreneur) was one Archibald Hood (1823-1902). According to this site here, and this site here, he grew up in Kilmarnock (East Ayrshire) in Scotland. This might explain why the 'Scotland' tag was attributed to this image initially. The Llwynypia Colliery became strongly associated with Archibald Hood, and was known locally as 'The 'Scotch' Colliery.

Archibald Hood was apparently brought up by his father (a widower), who was by trade, a colliery foreman. Hood himself started off with very little education and at the age of 12 was working in the mines himself. However, when his father became the manager of a colliery near Glasgow, Hood went on to study and qualify as a mining engineer. He then leased and operated pits/collieries all over the midlothian coalfields and developed a reputation as a moderniser, recognising that improving the conditions of the workers (both practically in the mines, and socially) would result in a more productive workforce. He went on to co-found the Lothian Coal Company in 1890, alongside Schomberg Kerr, 9th Marquess of Lothian (1833 - 1900)

Hood began working in the welsh coalfields/collieries in 1862, when he established the Glamorgan Coal Company; modernising and extending the pits in the area. At its peak there were 140 coke ovens, and a large brickworks which Hood also founded. In 1908, the colliery became part of the Cambrian Combine, and the waste gases from the coking process, were also used to provide electricity for the colliery and to power the streetlights in the local communities. Hood actually moved to Wales in 1867, was very active in the civic life of the community in Cardiff and throughout Glamorgan, and was well liked. Although he maintained his management of the Scottish collieries, he lived in Cardiff where he eventually died and is buried.

There is actually a statue/memorial to Archibald Hood in Llwynpia, you can see a picture of that here. (Although it is somewhat dwarfed by the large number of people crowded nearby!)

There is a really detailed history of Llwnypia here, which is fascinating. It also confirms that the name 'Llwynypia' translates from Welsh to English as '‘The grove of the bush of the magpie' and 'derives its name from a farm that stood on the land pre-industrialisation'.

The 1910 Cambrian Combine Miners Strike & Tonypandy Riot is covered here. (The strike itself became popularly known as The Tonypandy Riot.) It has become renown for being one of the few occasions in British history when troops were deployed against British workers. The strike began on August 01st 1910, and was a bitter dispute, with widespread consequences for miners across the region. The link outlines this in some detail.

Llwynpia has never really recovered from the closure of the collieries, and even today, it is one of the areas listed in the new.wales.gov.uk/topics/statistics/publications/wimd08sum... available online, as well as this wonderful coal swathed portrait of 'John Davies aged 12, one of the many children used in the physically demanding and dangerous work-environment of the mine shafts.

Despite Hood's endeavors, Average life expectancy was significantly reduced as the risk of colliery accidents were high. interestingly, after very little searching I've been able to find this reference to the death of George Henry Gaylard, who was born in Llwynypia in 1878, but died in an accident at Llwynypia colliery, aged 21 years. :( While he was born in the area, both his parents are recorded as having originated from Somerset. Whilst it isn't stated clearly, it appears that they probably moved over the border to Llwynypia for the employment opportunities offered by the presence of the colliery, where they subsequently stayed to raise their family. This 'sits' with my own family history, as my great-great-grandparents on my fathers side of the family, were from the area of Calne in Wiltshire, but moved to the Ebbw Vale/Brynmawr area of Wales (the county of Blaenau Gwent).

My great-great grandfather and my great uncle were miners. My father recalls meeting my great-uncle after the shift was over, at the pit head, on many, many occasions; and coal blackened as he was, carrying dad home on his shoulders, where both would be chastised by my great-grandmother, for getting so dirty. Subsequently, a big metal bath tub would be taken off the hook and placed in front of a roaring fire, where it would then be filled with scalding water. The youngest member of the family (at that time, my father) would be plunged into the water first, scrubbed, hauled out, followed by the next oldest and so... Re-using the bathwater until every member of the family was clean.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I know that welsh industrial history may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's such a compelling part of the my family history and my cultural heritage, I've been hooked. All because of this one image.

Thanks to The Commons.
Originally posted 41 months ago. (permalink)
Trapac edited this topic 41 months ago.

BobMeade says:

Thanks Trapac. Personal recollections, even tangential, add much.
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

BobMeade says:

Here's a bit of research.

I noticed in the Best of the Commons discussion here:
www.flickr.com/groups/flickrcommons/discuss/7215761180974...

that BigBean was quite taken with this photograph from the collection of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales:

BigBean says:

Holy mackerel!
That's a neat little bit of research there!

And you're right- I do love this image.
And I'm now going through every link you've just provided and reading more about it.

Cool!
Thanks so much!
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

@Trapac, @lifeasdaddy: It's amazing what lies beneath a simple photo. Even if The Commons photos have been selected by institutions as worthy of preservation. I love hearing how you find information and what gets you excited. I'm new to this stuff.
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

BobMeade says:

@ roketpad - well, if you are new to this you are doing very well. It's taken me a year of almost daily practice to get to the stage now where I can usually find some useful information about any significant Australian image pretty quickly.

I'm also not above using old school references like books.

To track down books I need, I use the National Library of Austalia's Libraries Australia facility which lets me track down books in libraries all over Australia and get them delivered to myt neighborhood library via an interlibraray loan:

librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au/apps/kss
Originally posted 41 months ago. (permalink)
BobMeade edited this topic 41 months ago.

The Other Pete    says:

roketpad wrote

And is there any taboos against adding hyperlinks in notes?

Trapac    says:

@The Other Pete: Wow! That's a hell of a good 'spot' :)
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

The Other Pete    says:

It's pretty much the only use I get out of all those Art History classes I took. ;-)
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

This photo had a surprising, tangential, personal connection for me.

On the boat, coming home

whatsthatpicture    says:

When you've found out lots about a picture, can I suggest inviting the owner to add it to the perfectly named "The astonishing power of Flickr" group - www.flickr.com/groups/flickrdiscoveries/ ?
Originally posted 41 months ago. (permalink)
whatsthatpicture edited this topic 41 months ago.

Helen Morgan    says:

Thank you all for sharing your enthusiasms, passions and research! There is a lot to draw out of this thread, but one I’ll raise now - a point of evangelism for us as users to pursue with Commons institutions - is the provision of citable URLs by the institutions putting their images and other cultural heritage information online.

Every link in lifeasdaddy’s wonderful post on the Hurley image takes you to the page he meant you to go to because those institutions have provided persistent, citable URLs, except the link to the image held by the National Archives of Australia (NAA). If you are not logged into their search system and/or your search session has timed out, then bad luck. If all institutions trode this path then you would find it next to impossible to share your research in the way you’re doing now.

Having run into this problem with citations of NAA holdings many years ago, my colleagues and I contacted them and were given the ‘back door’ way of constructing persistent URLs, based on the search URL. This is not ideal, and I don’t know why the Australian research community puts up with it! What will happen to that web of citation when the NAA decide to change their search system?

I see that this ‘back door’ URL has also been provided to Picture Australia so that they can provide a permanent link to the NAA image (hover over the ‘view image’ link in the Picture Australia citation). Unfortunately, what happens is that once you click on the link it does its job, but resolves itself to an uncitable URL, so the unsuspecting researcher grabs that – the only one provided – and the research chain is broken.

The permanent (for now?) link to the image of Whetter is:

http://naa12.naa.gov.au/scripts/SearchOld.asp?O=PSI2&Number=4746276

which resolves to the uncitable:

naa12.naa.gov.au/scripts/PhotoSearchItemDetail.asp?M=0&B=4746276&SE=1

To see what I mean, click on the permanent link, grab the URL it resolves to and paste into a different browser (e.g. into IE if you’ve been using Firefox.

A critical component of research is missing – the ability to cite sources. Need I say more?!
Originally posted 41 months ago. (permalink)
Helen Morgan edited this topic 41 months ago.

Rob Ketcherside    says:

@whatsthatpicture: I think most of The Commons would need to go in there. Try browsing through the Library of Congress photos in particular! I like the group, though.

@Helen_Morgan: I recently discovered that the shared image system for Washington State institutions has a "citation" button that I need to click to get the static redirect URL for each image. I wish they would just mask the URL in the address bar so that I don't need to remember that to have a useful link! But it's a whole lot easier than finding out about a back door. Here's what I linked to above.
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Helen Morgan    says:

@roketpad - agreed! We were discussing this at work recently - the citation button/link needs to be much more explicit on the page, or even better, as you say, to just be able to grab it as you would most other links.

I've thoroughly enjoyed following your progress on this thread, and you make a good case for institutions providing high res versions of their images - it allows further avenues for research (re. the number plates for example).
Originally posted 41 months ago. (permalink)
Helen Morgan edited this topic 41 months ago.

BobMeade says:

@ Helen Morgan - thank you for pointing out that problem with the link to the young & old Whetter photograph at the National Archives of Australia. Moreover, more thanks for supplying the solution.

I've substituted the link you gave back into my original screed to enable a better flow.

I'd forgotten about that problem of timed out search function at the NAA - and I wouldn't have come up with your solution anyway.
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

National Archives of Australia    says:

Hello lifeasdaddy, Helen Morgan and everyone else...

Re. permanent, citable links into collection databases... Just a note to say I agree! It is critical from the point of view of researchers but also institutions, that there is a good, easy way to link back to the source.

I can assure you that the National Archives of Australia is working to overcome the difficulty you identify.

We have a short-term solution in mind, which is to provide a linked reference number on every item description page (compiled using www.naa.gov.au/cgi-bin/Search?O=I&Number=x, where x is the barcode).

In the longer term, we're considering changing the search interface so that the URL path would work as a link.

Regards,
Catherine Styles, Managing Editor, Websites, National Archives of Australia
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

BobMeade says:

Thank you Ms. Styles - that's kind of you to give us an update and a view of the solution.
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

When I saw the title I thought it would be easy for a Then&Now photo:

Asakusa Temple at Tokio

Helen Morgan    says:

Catherine (NAA), that's excellent to hear! Please let me know when that is the case, and I'll pass it on to the Australian Women's Archives Project and others I know who are currently creating citations into the system.

Cheers,
Helen
(eScholarship Research Centre, The University of Melbourne)
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

@Helen_Morgan: I'm glad you're enjoying it (otherwise I have no reason to post!). In photo comments I try to stick to information about the photo... here I'm trying to share the thread of excitement in finding the information. Trapac, lifeasdaddy, Jayal, and j_neuberger all seem to have the same itch! Hopefully other folks give it a shot and share how they did it, what worked and didn't. I love reading it too!

@National Archives of Australia: That's great!

(totally unrelated note, I think I'm generating good archive karma... just got a freebie lookup/scan on a hundred year old letter!)
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

Moral of the story: Check the high res first.

Belem Prison - Mexico (LOC)

The Other Pete    says:

In keeping with my current fascination with the Smithsonian's Portraits of Artists set, I came across this photo the other day:

"Henry Ossawa Tanner in his studio" by smithsonian [?]


For some reason, I really wanted to know what the painting on the easel was. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any indication of what it might be using online resources. I did learn that Tanner was a devout Christian and later in his career focused almost entirely on religious subjects, so considering the most typical choices for Biblical scenes, the painting in question looks like either the adoration of the Magi or Christ teaching at the Temple, but I'm still working on finding a way to confirm that.

Not that the search was pointless, of course. For example, I learned that Tanner was the first African-American painter to achieve international notoriety. He studied in Philadelphia with Thomas Eakins, one of the innovators in art education, and became friends there with Robert Henri (one of the founders of the Ashcan School). He wound up moving to Paris in 1891 to escape the racial inequality of the time. His exposure to new artists and new teachers led to his Daniel in the Lion's Den being accepted into the 1896 Paris Salon (he had also shown at the 1895 Salon, but had gotten no notice from it). From there, his notoriety only increased. In 1923, he was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French government and was the first African-American granted full membership in the National Academy of Design. Tanner is also the first African-American painter to be part of the permanent collection of the White House. (In an interesting side note, I found this sketch of his studio elsewhere in the Smithsonian's collections.)

During WWI, Tanner worked with the Red Cross Public Information Department, painting scenes from the front lines.



He also seems to have come from a pretty fascinating family. He was the son of Benjamin Tanner, a prominent bishop and scholar in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church (whose journal is part of the Library of Congress collections). One of his sisters, Dr. Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson, was the first woman to pass the Alabama state medical exam and the first woman doctor at the Tuskegee Institute. Judging from Benjamin's journal, though, he wasn't quite enthusiastic about his growing family early on:

Another little girl has been given to me. And for what O Lord? I already have two and really I am so poor that I sometimes wonder how I shall meet my responsibilities. But I know that God is good and He will continue to provide for me and mine.

Rob Ketcherside    says:

Fascinating! And very timely for MLK Day.

Some day you'll figure out what painting that is. Make space for it on the back burners :)
Originally posted 41 months ago. (permalink)
Rob Ketcherside edited this topic 41 months ago.

The Other Pete    says:

There have been several books published on Tanner's work. I suspect that a quick glance through any of them would answer the question in an instant. Unfortunately, they're nowhere near me.

Maybe if someone's passing by the Library of Congress? ;-)
Posted 41 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

Interstate Commerce Com'n - members

zyrcster    says:

That is awesome research. I enjoyed your comment on the photo, too.

I wonder, wouldn't any photos from the "Bains News Service" have been used to decorate newspaper stories?

I wonder if there's a way to match the images to the new stories.
Posted 40 months ago. (permalink)

Rob Ketcherside    says:

At this point I'd love to read a book about news photography from this era.

The Bain finding aid discusses how the photos were gathered from and distributed to papers that were part of the Bain service. But which papers were those? Presumably the New York Times had their own, cheaper source of photos.

I searched a bit for this photo around the indicated date and found nothing. Papers from western states had more stories about the ICC because they were probably more interested on average than New Yorkers on the commission's activities. Some papers ran a portrait of Marble.

I ran across something interesting to me personally. This morning I was looking for information about the National Chamber of Commerce, formed in 1911. The VP for the Pacific Slope (west coast) was a man named Teal from Portland. In one article discussing Marble's nomination, it's stated that Teal was the president's original choice for the commission, but Lane convinced him to appoint Marble instead. Strange to run across the same man twice in one day, in different subject matter!
Posted 40 months ago. (permalink)

zyrcster    says:

oh look, the Toronto Star was one of the papers.