40 Wonderful Vintage Photos Showing People in Their Living Rooms During the 1950s
18 Rare Photographs of New Orleans in 1923
New Orleans is a consolidated city-parish located along the Mississippi River in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of Louisiana. With a population of 383,997 according to the 2020 U.S. census, it is the most populous city in Louisiana and the twelfth-most populous city in the Southeastern United States. Serving as a major port, New Orleans is considered an economic and commercial hub for the broader Gulf Coast region of the United States.
New Orleans is world-renowned for its distinctive music, Creole cuisine, unique dialects, and its annual celebrations and festivals, most notably Mardi Gras. The historic heart of the city is the French Quarter, known for its French and Spanish Creole architecture and vibrant nightlife along Bourbon Street. The city has been described as the “most unique” in the United States, owing in large part to its cross-cultural and multilingual heritage. Additionally, New Orleans has increasingly been known as “Hollywood South” due to its prominent role in the film industry and in pop culture.
Founded in 1718 by French colonists, New Orleans was once the territorial capital of French Louisiana before becoming part of the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. New Orleans in 1840 was the third most populous city in the United States, and it was the largest city in the American South from the Antebellum era until after World War II. The city has historically been very vulnerable to flooding, due to its high rainfall, low lying elevation, poor natural drainage, and proximity to multiple bodies of water. State and federal authorities have installed a complex system of levees and drainage pumps in an effort to protect the city.
New Orleans was severely affected by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, which flooded more than 80% of the city, killed more than 1,800 people, and displaced thousands of residents, causing a population decline of over 50%. Since Katrina, major redevelopment efforts have led to a rebound in the city’s population. Concerns about gentrification, new residents buying property in formerly closely knit communities, and displacement of longtime residents have been expressed.
The city and Orleans Parish (French: paroisse d’Orléans) are coterminous. As of 2017, Orleans Parish is the third most populous parish in Louisiana, behind East Baton Rouge Parish and neighboring Jefferson Parish. The city and parish are bounded by St. Tammany Parish and Lake Pontchartrain to the north, St. Bernard Parish and Lake Borgne to the east, Plaquemines Parish to the south, and Jefferson Parish to the south and west.
The city anchors the larger Greater New Orleans metropolitan area, which had a population of 1,271,845 in 2020. Greater New Orleans is the most populous metropolitan statistical area in Louisiana and, since the 2020 census, has been the 46th most populous MSA in the United States. (Wikipedia)
30 Vintage Photos Showing Life in Matlock (Derbyshire), England during the 1970s
Matlock is the county town of Derbyshire, England. It is situated at the south eastern edge of the Peak District. The town is twinned with the French town Eaubonne. The former spa resort Matlock Bath lies immediately south of the town on the A6. The Matlock area is considered to include Wirksworth, owing to the close proximity of the towns.
Matlock is nine miles (14 km) south-west of Chesterfield, and in easy reach of the cities of Derby (19 miles), Sheffield (20 miles), and Nottingham (29 miles); the Greater Manchester conurbation is 30 miles away. Matlock is within the Derbyshire Dales district, which also includes the towns of Bakewell and Ashbourne, as well as Wirksworth.
The headquarters of Derbyshire County Council are in the town.
These photos below show street scenes of Matlock in the 1970s.
34 Incredible Photos Showing Farm Life in Boston, Massachusetts from between the 1920s and 1940s
Leslie Ronald Jones (1886 – 1967) was a Boston, Massachusetts photographer. He was educated at the Farm and Trade School on Thompson Island. Jones first worked as a pattern-maker, but had long held an interest in photography. While working in a Boston factory, he continued developing himself as a freelance photographer. It was not until Jones unfortunately lost two of his fingers to the factory machinery, however, which led him to convert this avocation into his profession. He joined the Boston Herald-Traveler staff in 1917 and worked until 1956.
In his 39 years at the newspaper, Jones covered everything from a fox stuck in a tree on the Boston Common, to Charles Lindbergh’s U.S. tour after the aviator crossed the Atlantic. His photographs document both the usual and the unusual in the daily life of Boston and its surrounding regions, especially everyday life and portraits of newsmakers and celebrities in Boston, Massachusetts.
Here is a fantastic photo collection from Boston Public Library that he captured farm’s daily life in Boston, Massachusetts from the 1920s and the 1940s.
(Photos via Boston Public Library)
55 Stunning Photos of Marilyn Monroe Taken in 1956
Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton (1904-1980) was an English fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, interior designer and an Academy Award–winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre.
Beaton worked with Marilyn on February 22, 1956 at the Ambassador Hotel in New York. And here is his amazing work.
Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Mortenson; June 1, 1926 – August 4, 1962) was an American actress and model. Famous for playing comedic “blonde bombshell” characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s and was emblematic of the era’s sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million (equivalent to $2 billion in 2021) by the time of her death in 1962.[3] Long after her death, Monroe remains a major icon of pop culture. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her sixth on their list of the greatest female screen legends from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Monroe spent most of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage; she married at age sixteen. She was working in a factory during World War II when she met a photographer from the First Motion Picture Unit and began a successful pin-up modeling career, which led to short-lived film contracts with 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures. After a series of minor film roles, she signed a new contract with Fox in late 1950. Over the next two years, she became a popular actress with roles in several comedies, including As Young as You Feel and Monkey Business, and in the dramas Clash by Night and Don’t Bother to Knock. She faced a scandal when it was revealed that she had posed for nude photographs prior to becoming a star, but the story did not damage her career and instead resulted in increased interest in her films.
By 1953, Monroe was one of the most marketable Hollywood stars; she had leading roles in the film noir Niagara, which overtly relied on her sex appeal, and the comedies Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, which established her star image as a “dumb blonde”. The same year, her nude images were used as the centerfold and on the cover of the first issue of Playboy. She played a significant role in the creation and management of her public image throughout her career, but she was disappointed when she was typecast and underpaid by the studio. She was briefly suspended in early 1954 for refusing a film project but returned to star in The Seven Year Itch (1955), one of the biggest box office successes of her career.
When the studio was still reluctant to change Monroe’s contract, she founded her own film production company in 1954. She dedicated 1955 to building the company and began studying method acting under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Later that year, Fox awarded her a new contract, which gave her more control and a larger salary. Her subsequent roles included a critically acclaimed performance in Bus Stop (1956) and her first independent production in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). She won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for her role in Some Like It Hot (1959), a critical and commercial success. Her last completed film was the drama The Misfits (1961).
Monroe’s troubled private life received much attention. She struggled with addiction and mood disorders. Her marriages to retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio and to playwright Arthur Miller were highly publicized, and both ended in divorce. On August 4, 1962, she died at age 36 from an overdose of barbiturates at her Los Angeles home. Her death was ruled a probable suicide. (Wikipedia)
37 Amazing Color Photos of Downtown Los Angeles During the 1940s
Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in California. With a 2020 population of 3,898,747 it is the second-largest city in the United States, following New York City. Los Angeles is known for its Mediterranean climate, ethnic and cultural diversity, Hollywood film industry and sprawling metropolitan area.
The City of Los Angeles lies in a basin in Southern California, adjacent to the Pacific Ocean, and extends through the Santa Monica Mountains and into the San Fernando Valley, covering a total of about 469 square miles (1,210 km2). It is the seat of Los Angeles County, which is the most populous county in the United States with just over 10 million residents in 2020.
Home to the Chumash and Tongva indigenous peoples, the area that became Los Angeles was claimed by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo for Spain in 1542. The city was founded on September 4, 1781, under Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, on the village of Yaanga. It became a part of Mexico in 1821 following the Mexican War of Independence. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican–American War, Los Angeles and the rest of California were purchased as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and thus became part of the United States. Los Angeles was incorporated as a municipality on April 4, 1850, five months before California achieved statehood. The discovery of oil in the 1890s brought rapid growth to the city. The city was further expanded with the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, which delivers water from Eastern California.
Los Angeles has a diverse and robust economy, and hosts businesses in a broad range of professional and cultural fields. It also has the busiest container port in the Americas. In 2018, the Los Angeles metropolitan area had a gross metropolitan product of over $1.0 trillion, making it the city with the third-largest GDP in the world, after Tokyo and New York City. Los Angeles hosted the 1932 and 1984 Summer Olympics and will host the 2028 Summer Olympics. More recently, statewide droughts in California have further strained the city’s water security. (Wikipedia)
73 Amazing Black and White Photographs of London in the Swinging Sixties Era
The Swinging Sixties was a youth-driven cultural revolution that took place in the United Kingdom during the mid-to-late 1960s, emphasising modernity and fun-loving hedonism, with Swinging London as its centre. It saw a flourishing in art, music and fashion, and was symbolised by the city’s “pop and fashion exports”. Among its key elements were the Beatles, as leaders of the British Invasion of musical acts; Mary Quant’s miniskirt; popular fashion models such as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton; the mod subculture; the iconic status of popular shopping areas such as London’s King’s Road, Kensington and Carnaby Street; the political activism of the anti-nuclear movement; and sexual liberation.
Music was a big part of the scene, with “the London sound” including the Who, the Kinks, the Small Faces and the Rolling Stones, bands that were the mainstay of pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline, Wonderful Radio London and Swinging Radio England. Swinging London also reached British cinema, which, according to the British Film Institute, “saw a surge in formal experimentation, freedom of expression, colour, and comedy”. During this period, “creative types of all kinds gravitated to the capital, from artists and writers to magazine publishers, photographers, advertisers, film-makers and product designers”.
During the 1960s, London underwent a “metamorphosis from a gloomy, grimy post-war capital into a bright, shining epicentre of style”. The phenomenon was caused by the large number of young people in the city (due to the baby boom of the 1950s) and the postwar economic boom. Following the abolition of the national service for men in 1960, these young people enjoyed greater freedom and fewer responsibilities than their parents’ generation, and “[fanned] changes to social and sexual politics”.
Shaping the popular consciousness of aspirational Britain in the 1960s, it was a West End-centred phenomenon that happened among young, middle class people, and was considered “simply a diversion” by some of them. The swinging scene also served as a consumerist counterpart to the countercultural British underground of the same period. Simon Rycroft writes: “Whilst it is important to acknowledge the exclusivity and the dissenting voices, it does not lessen the importance of Swinging London as a powerful moment of image making with very real material effect.” “Swinging” remains the adjective most frequently applied to the 1960s as a decade (similar to the “Roaring” Twenties). (Wikipedia)
15 Rare Color Photographs of London During World War II
These color photos of London, spanning from the dark days of the Blitz to the triumphant celebrations of VE Day, were taken in Dufaycolor, a little-known photography process. They give another perspective on the period between 1943 and 1945 when Nazi Germany carried out a sustained aerial bombing campaign against Britain.
Introduced as cinematic film in 1932 and roll film in 1935, Dufaycolor was based on a four-color screen process developed by French chemist Louis Dufay. It was one of the last additive color processes to be marketed, consisting of a fine screen of red, green and blue filter lines printed over a film emulsion.
Though it was popular among professional and amateur photographers until the 1950s, Dufaycolor was ultimately surpassed by Kodachrome and other superior color processes.
59 Stunning Photos of Greta Garbo in the Film ‘Ninotchka’ (1939)
Ninotchka is a 1939 American romantic comedy film made for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by producer and director Ernst Lubitsch and starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas. It was written by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Walter Reisch, based on a screen story by Melchior Lengyel. Ninotchka is Greta Garbo’s first full comedy, and her penultimate film; she received her third and final Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. It is one of the first American films which, under the cover of a satirical, light romance, depicted the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin as being rigid and gray, in this instance comparing it with the free and sunny Parisian society of pre-war years.
Three Soviet agents, Iranoff (Sig Ruman), Buljanoff (Felix Bressart), and Kopalski (Alexander Granach), arrive in Paris to sell jewellery confiscated from the aristocracy during the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Count Alexis Rakonin (Gregory Gaye), a White Russian nobleman reduced to employment as a waiter in the hotel where the trio are staying, overhears details of their mission and informs the former Russian Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire) that her court jewels are to be sold by the three men. Her debonair paramour, Count Leon d’Algout (Melvyn Douglas) offers to help retrieve her jewellery before it is sold.
In their hotel suite, Iranoff, Buljanoff and Kopalski negotiate with Mercier (Edwin Maxwell) a prominent Parisian jeweller, when Leon interrupts the meeting. He explains that the jewels were seized illegally by the Soviet government and a petition has been filed preventing their sale or removal. Mercier withdraws his offer to purchase the jewellery until the lawsuit is settled.
The amiable, charming and cunning Leon treats the three Russians to an extravagant lunch, gets them drunk and easily wins their confidence and friendship. He sends a telegram to Moscow in their name suggesting a compromise.
Moscow, angered by the telegram, then sends Nina Ivanovna “Ninotchka” Yakushova (Greta Garbo), a special envoy whose goal is to win the lawsuit, complete the jewellery sale and return with the three renegade Russians. Ninotchka is methodical, rigid and stern, chastising Iranoff, Buljanoff and Kopalski for failing to complete their mission.
Ninotchka and Leon first meet outside the hotel, their respective identities unknown to one another. He flirts, but she is uninterested. Intrigued, Leon follows her to the Eiffel Tower and shows her his home through a telescope. Intrigued by his behavior, Ninotchka tells him he might warrant study and suggests they go to his apartment. Ninotchka becomes attracted to Leon and eventually, they kiss, but they are interrupted by a phone call from Buljanoff. Ninotchka and Leon both realize they are each other’s adversaries over the jewellery and she leaves the apartment, despite Leon’s protestations.
While attending to the various legal matters over the lawsuit, Ninotchka gradually becomes seduced by the west and by the persistent Leon, who has fallen in love with her and broken down her resistance. At a dinner date with Leon where she unexpectedly meets Swana face-to-face (her rival for the jewellery and for Leon’s affections), Ninotchka consumes champagne for the first time and quickly becomes intoxicated. The following afternoon, a hungover Ninotchka is awakened by Swana and discovers Rakonin has stolen the jewellery during the night. Swana tells Ninotchka that she will return the jewels and drop the litigation if Ninotchka leaves Paris for Russia immediately so that Swana can have Leon to herself. Ninotchka reluctantly agrees and completes the sale of the jewellery to Mercier. Later that evening, Ninotchka, Iranoff, Buljanoff and Kopalski fly back to Moscow. Meanwhile, Leon visits Swana and confesses his love for Ninotchka. Swana then informs Leon that Ninotchka has already left for Moscow. He attempts to follow her but is denied a Russian visa, because of his nobility.
Sometime later, in Moscow, Ninotchka invites her three comrades to her shared apartment for dinner and they nostalgically recall their time in Paris. Ninotchka finally receives a letter from Leon, but it has been completely censored by the authorities, and she is devastated.
More time passes; Iranoff, Buljanoff and Kopalski once again run afoul of their superiors after they fail at their mission to sell furs in Constantinople. Against her wishes, Ninotchka is sent by Commissar Razinin (Bela Lugosi) to investigate and retrieve the trio.
After Ninotchka arrives in Constantinople, the three Russians inform her that they have opened a restaurant and will not be returning to Moscow. When Ninotchka asks them who was responsible for this idea, they point to a balcony where Leon is standing. He explains that he was barred from entering Russia to win Ninotchka back, so he and the three Russians conspired to get her to leave the country. He asks her to stay with him and she happily agrees.
The final shot in the film is of Kopalski carrying a protest sign complaining that Iranoff and Buljanoff are unfair, because his name does not illuminate on the electric sign in front of their new restaurant. (Wikipedia)
22 Poignant Photos Showing Life in the Glasgow, Scotland Slum Known as the Gorbals in 1948
Up to 40,000 people lived in the notorious Glasgow slum of the Gorbals in the late 1940s. They live four, six, eight to a room, often 30 to a lavatory, 40 to a tap.
At first sight, of an early morning, the Gorbals looks like any other poor area. Its flat, wide streets are lined with flat-faced tenements. There is a pub on every corner and an undertaker’s (open day and night) in almost every other block.
It is not until you get inside the tenements that you realise the Gorbals is no ordinary poor place. It is, in fact, an area that provides a very special version of the slum problem. The tenement blocks in the Gorbals sprung up in the 1840s as people flocked to Glasgow to work in the city’s factories.
Unable to keep up with the demand for housing, the tenements were built quickly and cheaply and were designed to pack as many people in as possible. But appalling conditions came with it and it was not unusual for houses to have no water facilities and for sewage to run through the streets.
In its beginnings, the problem was one of immigration. A century ago, thousands of poor labourers began to arrive in Glasgow. They came to work on the new-fangled railways and the docks of the Clyde. They came for higher wages, for fuller plates, for what they conceived to be a better way of life than was possible in starving Erin and the wasted Scottish Highlands.
