1941 State Fair
April 24, 2017 8:02 AM   Subscribe

 
Wow, the color saturation. I am on my mobile device and can't tell if there is any link or info to the Library of Congress's metadata for these? What camera, film type, etc were used?

Thank you for sharing this!
posted by nightrecordings at 8:16 AM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


Those teenagers are in for a tough few years.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:19 AM on April 24, 2017 [12 favorites]


These are great! I wish there were pictures from inside the sideshow tents.
posted by MythMaker at 8:22 AM on April 24, 2017




There's no link on the site to the Library of Congress but I bet you could go to the LC site and root around in the Farm Administration section to find info. As far as color saturation goes, I don't think Fuji film was available in 1941 so it was probably Kodak.
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:26 AM on April 24, 2017


I love this. The picture of the girls in the pink dresses is particularly great. You know their mama made those dresses. The kid on the left looks like a line drawing of a bratty heroine in a paperback middle-grade book I'd have read back in the day.

The Shelburne Museum in Vermont (an amazing national resource IMO) had an exhibition of circus posters that were found layered on the broad side of a house in rural Vermont. The circus came and went and left its posters year after year, and once they were recognized as real art, preservationists were able to rescue a lot of them. That art resembles the banners here, and probably came from the same companies.

I was at the Lamoille County Fair this summer and it was considerably less wholesome, especially in the vendor booths. There's no excuse for selling Confederate flag bullshit up this way. But it was a real farm fair with livestock, and since the only rides were kiddie rides, I did get to see the shortest Ferris wheel I'd ever seen, about the size of a two-story house. It was adorable.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:29 AM on April 24, 2017 [11 favorites]


God, I wish we could just have one nice thing without it having to somehow end up being about James Franco...
posted by Naberius at 8:49 AM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


@entropicamericana What I wouldn't do to get a taste of Cutting the pies and cakes at the barbeque dinner, Pie Town, New Mexico Fair
posted by SNACKeR at 8:53 AM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


Boy they liked their freak shows back in 1941 Vermont.

My favorite photo is the tailgating.
posted by Nelson at 8:59 AM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]


Oh man, these photos formed the primary part of the visual inspiration pack for a script I wrote, finished, polished and then never got produced despite a lot of buy in.

They're great photos tho. I wanted to directly reference half of them.
posted by The Whelk at 9:11 AM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]


I once rented a room from these two lovely people, and while helping Kitty with some yard work she showed my a collection of large-format stereo pictures that Boyd had taken on slide film, mostly in color, early in their relationship. He'd mounted the paired slides side-by-side between pieces of window glass, taped around the edges, and built a Viewmaster-like contraption with surplus WWII military lenses on a Bakelite box fastened together with tiny brass screws, and a pushbutton switch for the back light. This was all stored in a leaky, unheated shed behind the house. The 3-D color images of the Mendocino coast in the early '50s, hovering droplets of water broken from the crest of a wave; of Kitty smiling next to a horse sometime in her early 20s; of a national park vista that seemed familiar but lacked the asphalt road I thought should be there... they were some of the most magical things I've ever seen.
posted by jon1270 at 9:23 AM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]


I think I remember a couple of those sideshow posters from the Oklahoma State Fair in the 1960's (Alligator Skin Boy!). We never got the Third Sex Family, though.
posted by yhbc at 9:29 AM on April 24, 2017


Looking at these photos, and then thinking of what I see at our local county fair (Northern KY), it seems to me these things haven't really changed too much.
posted by bwvol at 9:43 AM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


Amazing! And, wow, Ruth the Acrobat... quite the sturdy haunches and that young lady.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 9:51 AM on April 24, 2017


What camera, film type, etc were used?

In 1941, Kodachrome was the only color film on the market capable of making pictures like that. And it was only available for still cameras in 35mm format; these pictures were in all likelihood taken with a quality rangefinder camera, a Leica or a Contax or similar.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 10:08 AM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]


That third sex poster stopped me in my tracks as I was scrolling. I wonder what the story was behind it.
posted by Hermione Granger at 10:31 AM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


That third sex poster stopped me in my tracks as I was scrolling. I wonder what the story was behind it.

Tits. The story behind it was tits.
posted by The Tensor at 10:41 AM on April 24, 2017 [6 favorites]


I can't help noticing the litter in some of the photos.
posted by vivzan at 10:50 AM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


The litter at these kinds of fairs was what motivated Walt Disney to build Disneyland. He couldn't stand how filthy these fairs were.
posted by Hermione Granger at 12:01 PM on April 24, 2017 [5 favorites]


Sort of hilarious and sort of grim that all the banners note the sideshow performers are "ALIVE!"
posted by roger ackroyd at 12:38 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]


Guess they wanted the audience to be sure they weren't getting sold a look at nothing but some pickled punks.

I saw a live "freak" at a traveling carnival in Mississippi in '94. And by that I mean a guy in a gross wig, slumping over in a wheelchair and pretending to be catatonic, marketed as a real live heroin addict, a survivor of drug abuse. Lots of lurid carnival language around it. It's pretty horrifying to think of now, of course, and really I should have stormed off the grounds, but I was fifteen and not very woke, and the dude was clearly fine, insofar as anyone in that job could be said to be "fine." There was even a little TV on beside him.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:56 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


My Dad's family is from Rutland County (still farming there). I'd seen several of these before, but it never occurred to me that my grandfather and his sister might actually have been there when Jack Delano was. There are some people in the crowd shots that look so much like my lingering image of him, though they're probably a decade too old. He still looked like a '40s man well into the '80s.

Some of these are new to me. The first and third images are really beautiful! The grandstand that's visible in the shot of the guy with the big mallet for the strength tester is still there and in use.

My favorites in Vermont are the Addison County Field Days (August, very agricultural) and Tunbridge World's Fair (September). Tunbridge is fantastic, but is a bit of a victim of it's own awesomeness. It's mobbed on Friday and Saturday and the space is...topographically limited.
posted by GodricVT at 1:00 PM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]


Why don't you ever see anyone with terrible skin in these old photos? Everyone's hair looks just as difficult as you'd imagine, but why don't you see anyone with really bad acne?
posted by HotToddy at 2:58 PM on April 24, 2017


I'm pretty sure the sign in the second photo that says "BLESSED EVENT" and "ALIVE" is advertising an exhibit of baby incubators.
posted by nonasuch at 5:43 PM on April 24, 2017


Being old enough to have visited freak and side shows at county fairs in my childhood, I recall that some attractions like the "giant octopus," mermaid, the ape man and some others were merely models on luridly lit stages or water filled tanks and barrels. This may account for those attractions boasting of being "alive", as were most certainly the "dog boy", fat lady ("Go ahead, ask me any questions. Anything you want to know?"), and lizard man. BLESSED EVENT and "live birth" attractions were not live, but inevitably a crudely screened movie such as you might see in a high school health class of the time.
posted by Modest House at 6:12 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


Looking for Fern and Henry Fussy.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:21 PM on April 24, 2017


Rare bi-tonal photograph album of the 1907 New York State Fair.
posted by mfoight at 7:10 AM on April 25, 2017


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