The Softer Sex
I bought a selection of vintage German magazines from Peter’s Antiques in Swakopmund, Namibia a few years back. This copy of Neue Illustriert from October 1955 is one of them.
Ive taken shots of some of the great old images of women from the mag. The cover is frame worthy.
Vintage images of images from a 1950’s fashion/mother and child magazine printed in Germany but found and bought at Peter’s Antiques in Swakopmund Namibia.
The magazine includes fashion editorials, tips, health and lifestyle articles plus sexing and knitting patterns.
Collecting beautiful, old, anonymous pictures of women is a bit like finding Easter eggs, for me that is. I collected this selection of negatives and glass-encased, hand-coloured “positives” from a thrift shop in Observatory and from the Milnerton Market in Cape Town in 2012-2013.
I only scanned the images in 2015 and haven’t had the right moment since then to carefully put the scans properly back together (the unusual formats of the pieces meant that they needed to be scanned from multiple angles to capture all the info which Ive now puzzled back together).
Wish I knew more about them.
I lived in Stuttgart for a period of months when I was 17. I was going to school there and living with a friend and her family who stayed in a picturesque village out of town.
I had a cheap-as-hell 35mm film camera and shot a lot of film while on the trip. There were three occasions however on which I took photos that have since inspired my work….
The images are haphazard; they were randomly and spontaneously captured and seem reminiscent of portholes into moments one can nostalgically never quite return to. They represent a sort of iconic state of femininity and abandon.
Maybe it has something to do with the dreaminess that is European light? Maybe it was the nondescript spaces? And maybe it was the naive innocence and carefree joy of those Summer days and the freedom that came with the times…I don’t know.
There was a small sort of wilderness directly behind the family home where some of these images were taken on a funny day between the four of us. I think we’d just gone for a walk and had ended up messing about doing gymnastics and sunbathing in the long grass and flowers.
A second occasion was an excavated dam on the border of France on a day trip around Easter and the third was out and about during a spontaneous afternoon of paddle-boating on a lake on day after school.
I suppose these images represent the moments that come between naivety and self-awareness, and in this I find beauty and inspiration.
Sadly, I posted some of the negatives to Germany years later and never got them back. Jojo, if you ever find them, please return them to me!
In first year photography, about 5 years later, I tried to re-create the atmosphere of these original images shot in 2000 as one of my personally motivated projects.
These new images, shot on Holga, have a certain energy but I felt like it was impossible to capture again the fleeting moments of those perfectly naive years before…
