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Daily Print Hunting

Friday again! You'll have to check the site for today's Daily Print if you're not a subscriber.
This lovely photograph is one of my mother's, taken with an old Brownie box camera. My sister and our dog going off into the orchard with a bow and some arrows -- those were the days . . .

Party Hard, GC & Marcin, too!

Photo: Nurse Rabbit's Mam

Bedtime reading

Old family photos II

Front row (l to r) Ernestine McCleary, Velma Thompkins, Gussie Cribb, unidentified woman. Back row (l to r) Raleigh Ross, Annie Reynolds (Thompson), Harry Treeye, Gladys Reynolds (Ward), Mary Louise Cribb (Refoe) and Zack Spears. - Fernandina Beach, Florida.

These young people maintained their connections through old age. When my grandmother, Louise Cribb, died at age 83, she was still writing letters to some of the people who went to a local photographer and had this picture taken. The small, black community was insulated from much of the racism that was prevalent during the first decade of the 20th century. This photo was taken between 1911 and 1914; by 1914, Louise Cribb had become Louise Refoe, and she had moved to Sanford, Florida.





In 1989, the Florida A & M University (FAMU) Marching 100 was the United States representative in the Bastille Day parade. Their membership generally numbers more than 300 young men and women.

Florida A & M University started out as Florida State Normal School. Its purpose was to provide vocational training for black students. My grandfather was born in 1890 and passed away in 1987. In 1908, he was a student studying tailoring in Tallahassee, Florida where FAMU is located, and he was a member of the band and the baseball team.

Herman L. Refoe, Sr. is the sixth man from the left on the back row in the band picture, and he is the second player from the right in the baseball picture. He didn’t graduate, but he used his tailoring skills to support his family as evidenced by the reefer worn by his son between 1934 and 1938 at Florida A & M College (FAMC), which is now FAMU.





Silver Springs is noted for its glass-bottomed boats. In May 1949, students and teachers from Midway Elementary School, located east of Sanford, Florida in what was then an agricultural area, were used in the brochure advertising Paradise Park.

Jim Crow was alive and well in the two separate parks. Note the use of the nomenclature “colored people.” This vernacular is no longer in regular usage.

Text by © Annye Refoe
in cooperation with William Schmidt who scanned the photos.

Kamila Kulik's Family Album

These pictures were taken in 1975 by my father - Karol Kulik in Gdansk, Poland. This little girl is my sister who was 1 year old then, and next to her is my mother.

text by Kamila

Family Album

This is a picture of my grandparents and my uncle Geppina walking by the streets of Salerno. Although I like this very much because it's one of the very few pictures of my grandparents being relatively young, what brings me back to this image is the unknown person behind them. She's probably accidentally got into the picture but I get the feeling that she's stalking them or just doing something weird. Which makes me wonder about how a simple "error" in a family portrait can become an opportunity for my imagination and how a picture "talks" in many ways we wouldn't expect to. -Mirko Caserta

faces of 1926

A Swedish school class of 1926. Provided by Margareta Cortes. Photographer unknown.

Fiat 500 travelled all the way to Poultikasvaara

Our first car, when I was a little girl was a Fiat 500. We were so proud of it, although it did not have a real back seat, just a board where we put a matress. It was not a powerful car, I remember us cheering on Dad and the Fiat when the road went upwards in order to get us to the top.
Poultikasvaara is Sami language and means "nettle hill"
Text: Margareta Cortes Photo: Karl-Gunnar Roth (her brother)

Old Family Photos

John Hope Franklin wrote about the "Negro" in society, and he said that in some parts of the nation, there were black folks who were a part of "society." Either their skin color (more often than not) or their educational levels gave them entree into the hoity toity world of vacations, balls, college frats and sororities, and houses of their own.

My parents were teachers in a small, Southern town. They had been taking vacations since the 1940s. Of course, they always stayed with friends and family, but Fernandina Beach aka American Beach was my first vacation with them. When I see them sitting there so young and happy, I have to pinch myself. They never showed displays of affection in front of folks.

My Mother was a lady and my dad liked to think of himself as a hoodlum, but he really wasn't. They worked together for almost 60 years, and when death separated them, the pain in my father's face was so intense, I had to look away. My favorite memory of this couple involves my father looking at my mother as I looked at him. I watched his features soften and the color in his hazel warm as he looked at my mother's face. They were a team, and now I'm glad they're back together.






The Afro-American Motel was the crown jewel of American Beach--the part of Fernandina Beach that we could visit. My first trip there was as a six month old. Across the street from the motel was a house made like a ship--it had portholes and everything. When I returned at five, I used to watch that house for hours. It was one of the first houses I had seen that had a garage, so every time the car disappeared into the house, I was amazed.

My grandmother was born in Fernandina Beach, and I've traced her ancestors back two generations. She had a cousin named Harry Treye who only had arm, but Mr. Treye could do anything a person with two arms could do. We used to go to the Treyes whenever we visited Fernandina, and it was such a treat. It was a huge (from my pre-teen years) house with a wonderful front porch and a bathroom that was added later and was situated on the back porch.









Our days in Fernandina were spent on American Beach in the mornings and sight seeing in the afternoons. When I look at the pictures now, none are as touching for me as the one of my parents when they were young and almost carefree. I love their lineless faces--their vibrant skin--their ability to touch each other unabashedly. It is hard to see them so alive when I remember how they were when they left me.

Text by © Annye Refoe
in cooperation with William Schmidt who scanned the photos.

Father and car

Benny Persson from the beautiful province of Blekinge says: "This is a double exposure (probably deliberate) of my father and his car. Photographer unknown. Date: End of the 1950's."

from a family album, Scotland

The photographer was my father, Daniel Hepburn. The girl is an unidentified child at my grandparent's old house in Scotland. - Darren Hepburn

family album: view from a Fiat 600

My father, a passionate photographer, used to shoot with a second hand Agfa Silette (that has been my first camera when I was 10-12 years old). No light meter and focusing by guessing distances. It’s 1963 (one year before my birth). Two couples went for a trip in a winter day with my father’s second hand Fiat 600: my father Gian, his sister Anna Rosa, my mother Marilù and my uncle Franco.

During that trip he shoot two funny “portraits”. In the countryside downhill a big stone is put under the car wheel… an escaped danger for my mother, trustfully smiling looking outside the car-window. The picture of my aunt Anna Rosa strike me for her beauty almost like a movie star, but in that weird location looking at the wall (but… was her husband Franco hidden there?).

In both cases: one unattractive location, the car, a lonely woman inside looking out. It’s a scheme with quite a distance mood… but funny isn’t it? - Text: Paolo Saccheri, photos: Gian Saccheri

family album

My father, born 1943, used to develop and print film when he was younger. He told me this self-portrait was printed using an adapted bellows camera (which is his way of saying he screwed a perfectly working bellows camera to make his own enlarger). Years later, he taught me about the darkroom process. I had my own semiprofessional Durst enlarger and everything but I never was able to get a print as amazing as this one. - Mirko Caserta

F is for Family

This is my grandfather Carl S. Buchanan. Jaunty hat, enigmatic grin…external details that belie his true character. I met him once at a family reunion when I was a child and he never spoke. Just a perfunctory pat on the head as he turned back to his cigarette. Over the years I have heard stories about his life in Tennessee. He lived with my grandmother and their seven children in a small, rural town, sharing a tiny two-room shack. He was a moonshiner and a gambler…evading the law…a picturesque character… But then the other stories have surfaced, acts of cruelty too horrific to mention here. Sometimes we look back at family albums to understand where we came from. But we also look back to see what we have escaped…

(I'm not sure who took this picture but it appears to be a studio picture taken in the 40's or 50's)

From family archives

I received these lines from Emese Altnöder, Hungary; "the photographer unknown, on the picture my grandfather visible diving, a picture from the family archive."

On the F Blog we are open to all possible directions or categories of photography, helping us to explain what the magic of photography is about. We will continue to show photojournalism, realism, surrealism, modernism or any other "ism" related to photography you may think of or invent...yes even pictorialism! When it comes to technique we have pinhole photos, pictures made with large format cameras, digital, film etc. To us it is the image that matters, not the "category" or "technique" or the name of the photographer.

I think it is by time that we have a look into the family albums to see what they hold. Welcome to send pictures to our inbox. Please only send pictures that are in your possesion, it doesn´t matter if it is your old grandfather's album or some photo found in a shoebox etc. If you know about the photographer, give him or her credit. If not, you just name it "photographer unknown". Come to think of it (F)amily begins with F too! Stay tuned to the coolest photoblog around! There for Photography.