Arthur Griffin Collection

Arthur Griffin was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts on September 12, 1903. Originally trained to be an illustrator, in 1929 he picked up his first camera -- a second-hand folding Brownie -- and thus began a passion that would last a lifetime.

By the mid-1930's, Arthur Griffin had become the exclusive photographer for the newly created Boston Globe Rotogravure Magazine and the New England photojournalist for Life and Time magazines. He went on to become a pioneer in the use of color film and provided the first color photographs to appear in the Saturday Evening Post - a two-page layout on New England.

 Artists, Ogunquit, Maine. Perkins Cove, 1939

  

 Old cars at Framingham

  

 Old cars at Framingham

  

 Old cars at Framingham

  

Old cars at Framingham

 
Source: Digital Commonwealth

Frank B. Rodolph Photograph Collection

Frank Bequette Rodolph (1843-1923) was a commercial photographer active in Oakland during the 1870s and 1880s. Born in Wisconsin, he and his family traveled overland to California in 1850. They settled first in Placerville and later operated a ranch on Cache Creek. Moving to Oakland in 1869, Rodolph attended business college and opened a stationery store on Broadway in partnership with his father. The store also sold school books and sheet music, and in the 1880s Rodolph began doing printing work as well. Many of his photographs were taken on his extensive travels throughout California.

The Frank B. Rodolph collection consists of 1254 original photographs taken by Rodolph and associates, including Isaiah W. Taber. The Taber photographs, primarily of Alaska, can be found in volume 14 (BANC PIC 1905.17159). Rodolph's subjects include a variety of cityscapes, residences and other buildings chiefly of the San Francisco Bay Area, Sonoma County, Santa Cruz and Monterey areas of California. Many of the photographs are of recreational and leisure activities, including outings of a Bay Area group of photographers (including Rodolph) who called themselves "the Merry Tramps."

 "For the Hay" - two men and equipment on a farm

  

 "Knowles" (a humble dwelling and several people in Sonoma County)

  

 "The Wringer" (two women at a washtub in the redwoods of Sonoma County)

  

 At Wrights Station, man and woman in a surrey

  

"The wood teams going home" Sonoma County

 

Source: California Digital Library

Luther Hamilton Photo Collection

 Barbershop

  

 Interior of small market

[The "V" makes me wonder if this is a World War II-era photo.]

  

Portrait photograph of unidentified woman and infant

  

 Twins, ca. 1900

  

W. E. Garland’s tomato packing shed

 

Source: Luther Hamilton Photo Collection

New York City

 A Fifth Avenue stage, New York, 1900-06

  

A hansom at Madison Square, New York, ca. 1900

  

 A Municipal ferry, New York, NY, 1905-20

  

 Banana docks, New York, ca. 1906

  

Central Park, the tennis courts, New York, 1900-10

Beatlemania!

Beatlemania (noun: extreme enthusiasm for the Beatles, as manifested in the frenzied behavior of their fans in the 1960s) was a fascinating (and for grown-ups of the time, disturbing) sociological phenomenon. It was a very real thing, as these photos attest.

Newell Family

The Newell family photograph album shows family members, their houses (interior, exterior and grounds), family homesteads, farms, mills, views from their Boston offices, and their West Newton neighborhood. The Newell family moved from Colrain, Massachusetts to West Newton, leaving their farming roots to become successful merchants, inventors, and manufacturers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

 Aunt Ann Carrol's summer cottage at Onset Bay

  

 Channing, Florence Newell, Alice Wight and Hamlet Wight in front of the 

Hamlet and Lucy Wight residence and farm in Medfield, Massachusetts

  

 Children with toys

  

 Clifford Mead, Florence and Channing

  

 Family 4th of July party about 1896 or 1897

  

 Family posed on rocks

 

Source: Digital Commonwealth

Walter McClintock

Pittsburgh native Walter McClintock graduated from Yale in 1891. In 1896 he traveled west as a photographer for a federal commission investigating national forests. McClintock became friends with the expedition’s Blackfoot Indian scout, William Jackson or Siksikakoan. When the commission completed its field work, Jackson introduced McClintock to the Blackfoot community of northwestern Montana. Over the next twenty years, supported by the Blackfoot elder Mad Wolf, McClintock made several thousand photographs of the Blackfoot, their homelands, their material culture, and their ceremonies.

Like his contemporary, the photographer Edward Curtis, McClintock believed that Indian communities were undergoing swift, dramatic transformations that might obliterate their traditional culture. He sought to create a record of a life-way that might disappear. He wrote books, mounted photographic exhibitions, and delivered numerous public lectures about the Blackfoot.

 Apina-kaki (Morning woman) making rawhide cases

  

 Blackfeet camp in the evening with three men on horseback

  

 Blackfeet woman at work under a sun-shelter with a child nearby

  

 Cutbank Valley with Indian scouts

  

Group of Blackfeet women at the Buffalo tipi working on a large lodge-cover

 

Source: Yale University Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

 Bashkir switchman

  

 Kurdish woman with children

  

 Materiki

  

 Peasant binding hay. Perm province

  

Shipping vodka. Borzhom