Historical Photographs (NSFW)

More than literature, visual arts have been giving us a sense of history since the very first visual representation. From fashion to politics, sociology to history itself, there is lots of information we can get from paintings and photography in history of art.

If you go to a museum of fashion, natural history or theatre, you can see amazing paintings full of details that can show us how people lived at the time, how animals were, how life was.

The same happens with photography, and possibly in a more reliable way. From the construction of great monuments to wars or just life, photography can be one of the most important sources of documentation.

Sometimes is not even a great photograph, but it can be a great document for us to know better what was in there. Do you know for example that the Statue of Liberty, made in Paris, was also designed by Eiffel who created a inside structure very similar to the one he used for the Eiffel Tower itself? Or that for certain period exotic animals was trendy? How did people use to take bath at the beach? How are the faces of the greatest writers, or even greatest achievers in psychology or sociology? Isn’t the portrait of Einstein one of the most famous one?

Here you have a collection of some of those photographs that can give us some flash back in time. Some are from unknown photographers, or at least I couldn’t find the authors of them. If you know the author, please let us know so we can give proper credit.

While the design of the statue is credited to Frédéric Bartholdi, you might be surprised to know that to actually build the structure, Bartholdi enlisted the help of none other than a man called Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. Does the name sound familiar? I hope it does, because he’s the guy who built the Eiffel Tower almost ten years later.

You might have noticed Eiffel’s touch in the photograph above which shows us an iron truss towered that became the structural core of the statue. It looks a little bit like another tower I know in Paris that has over 20,000 visitors everyday…!

In 1913 it was legal to mail children. With stamps attached to their clothing, children rode trains to their destinations, accompanied by letter carriers. One newspaper reported it cost fifty-three cents for parents to mail their daughter to her grandparents for a family visit. As news stories and photos popped up around the country, it didn’t take long to get a law on the books making it illegal to send children through the mail.

But people had strange habits by the time…

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June, 2014 by ©Gonzalo Bénard for 2HeadS

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For any other contact about 2HeadS or my Photographic Work, from Art Galleries, Curators, Art Collectors, etc, please use the GBénard/2HeadS email. Thank you.

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