Not nearly as disturbing as what I had in my mind’s eye. I’m a bit disappointed. Dora, Star Child, is much creepier.
Also, that’s not the same building. The clapboard and foundation are different in either picture. One has wide, wooden clapboard with a concrete base, the other one has thinner painted clapboards with a stone masonry base.
I LOVE you people (kisses everyone on the lips…or manfully claps them on their shoulder and shakes their hands respectfully, appropriateness as indicated. Let’s face it: gender preference is a force to be contended with).
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!
Not the same building at all…man, am I getting old. I can’t get the message board link to work, either.
I hope nobody was too disappointed by this (I see upon review that someone was…sorry); but if you were…: Just imagine rolling over in the middle of the night and opening your eyes, and seeing one of these people standing in the corner of your dark bedroom just staring at you.
Then they start to chuckle like Dwight Frey in Todd Browning’s film version of “Dracula”.
“A-hunh-hunh-hunh-hunh.”
And you wake up your bed partner in a panic, but all they can see is an empty room. It’s only you.
Orgasms are fun, but it’s the frissons that you remember.
I don’t see why they wouldn’t be photographed. Several years ago, my mom and I were looking through an old photo album that used to belong to my great-grandmother. There was a group photo of what looked like a social gathering of some kind, and it included a woman with an enlarged head, not unlike the Dora pictures, though she looked to be in her 20s. Anyway, it was rural Mennonite community, so congenital diseases related to inbreeding weren’t all that uncommon.
No, no, it’s a man. It’s the Kaiser in drag. Think about it: It’s the '20s, he would have been a popular person to make fun of in Halloween costume form
No, it’s not a drag queen–it’s a drag king! Look, that mustache is really a ponytail clipped to grandfather’s cap and the rest is an illusion of light and shadow and… (I don’t know, I sort of zoned out on this post)
She or he is wearing a sleeping skull-cap, which was the style at the time
That’s not a baby alien, it’s a severed hand. THERE’S A HAND IN THE JAR! AH! And look! It has DEVIL EYES! DOUBLE AH!
Page 3:
Yeah… I think it’s a tiny Pillsbury Doughboy, maybe some kind of promo thing
Can’t be, that didn’t come out until the '60s
Maybe it’s burn victim outside a country clinic
Why would they take a picture of that?
Slow news day
Page 4:
The colors don’t match and there’s lots of “visible edging”, definitely a mask
No, no, far too sinister to be a mask
The whole thing’s just a illusion caused by lens flare and overexposure and generally poor photography
She’s balancing on her left foot
Maybe it’s a mannequin
Can’t be a mask, otherwise she’d have to be bald, and whoever heard of that?
No, idiot, both feet are on the ground
She’s wearing a motorcycle cap and goggles and has her ponytail in front of her face
The seller’s other photos are fake, why should this one be any different?
I contacted the seller and he said: …I am an artist … I found the picture in an old box … in L.A. … I’m an expert photographer, so I can date it exactly … not retouched … silly me for putting it on eBay when my private contacts would have given me big, big bucks for it … great deal for such unique artistry … I know nothing about it
Page 5:
The face is all disproportionate
Mask
Performance art
Looks vaguely like the torturer’s baby mask in Brazil
No, the chef from the Muppets
It’s a biting satire of the nuclear family ideal
It’s a fraud, completely and totally
Page 6:
There’s nothing mysterious about the hands, they’re just in the apron’s pockets
It’s a wooden mask
Very, very elaborate scarecrow?
No, no, not a scarecrow
But if it were a scarecrow…
No, I’m going with burn victim
Then it trails off with the introduction of a totally dissimilar picture
I want to thank Dusty for finding these. I never noticed the “baby alien” in the background of the first pic, but it certainly looks like a wee human critter in a jar back there. I don’t know the origin of these two pictures, but they are strange for sure, and that’s what intrigued me about them.
Dusty: You are my hero. I thank you most profoundly.
The “jar” in the window may be a coffee can with a picture on the side, but the picture (as far as I can blow it up without pixellating it too much) sure looks like a small child with legs spread and a manly bit that I may have reason to be somewhat jealous of.
I’m with you on the hydrocephalus, though. That’s what I thought when I saw it, too.
It’s a concrete statue of a Jackrabbit. The ears are not tied on, but there’s something like wire or cord tied or wrapped around the ears. Something else, like a ribbon is tied from the top in front of the ears around the chin.
Hey, thanks for the Meatyard reference! I’d heard of Diane Arbus, but not Ralph Eugene Meatyard. I’ve been digging around, looking for some of his stuff, and I see things that look similar (in terms of old buildings and people whose faces look wrong). For example:
I haven’t been able to match up the photos in question with either Arbus nor Meatyard yet, but I’ve decided that I want to know who shot these, if it’s possible to find out.
Whoever it was (or they were), I want more.
One thing that I have decided is that if the seller of the first photo realized that it was by a famous photographer, they would have sold it as such to get a better price. To my recollection (which is obviously faulty in spots), they did not. So, either they did not know, or it isn’t.
