‘Jumpology’

When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears” ~ Philippe Halsman

The freezing of motion has a long and fascinating history in photography … But rarely has stop-action been used in the unlikely, whimsical and often mischievous ways that Philippe Halsman employed it. [B]ecause of Halsman’s sense of play, we have the jump pictures—portraits of the well known, well launched.

This odd idiom was born in 1952, Halsman said, after an arduous session photographing the Ford automobile family to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary. As he relaxed with a drink offered by Mrs. Edsel Ford, the photographer was shocked to hear himself asking one of the grandest of Grosse Pointe’s grande dames if she would jump for his camera. “With my high heels?” she asked. But she gave it a try, unshod—after which her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Henry Ford II, wanted to jump too.

For the next six years, Halsman ended his portrait sessions by asking sitters to jump. It is a tribute to his powers of persuasion that Richard Nixon, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Judge Learned Hand (in his mid-80s at the time) and other figures not known for spontaneity could be talked into rising to the challenge of…well, rising to the challenge. He called the resulting pictures his hobby, and in Philippe Halsman’s Jump Book, a collection published in 1959, he claimed in the mock-academic text that they were studies in “jumpology.”

Images: 1. Marilyn Monroe, 2. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, 3. Sophia Loren, 4. Shirley Maclaine, 5. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, 6. Hattie Jacques, 7. Audrey Hepburn, 8. Grace Kelly, 9. J. Fred Muggs.

[Source: Smithsonian Mag | More Images]

Harry Whittier Frees

Harry Whittier Frees (1879–1953) was an American photographer who created novelty postcards and children’s books based on his photographs of animals. He dressed the animals and posed them in human situations with props, often with captions; these can be seen as progenitors of modern lolcats.

[Images Source - there’s loads more]

(Source: Wikipedia)

Aerial Reconnaissance Pigeons

Pigeon photography is an aerial photography technique invented in 1907 by the German apothecary Julius Neubronner, who also used pigeons to deliver medications. A homing pigeon was fitted with an aluminium breast harness to which a lightweight time-delayed miniature camera could be attached.

Initially, the military potential of pigeon photography for aerial reconnaissance appeared attractive. Battlefield tests in the First World War provided encouraging results, but the ancillary technology of mobile dovecotes for messenger pigeons had the greatest impact.

Owing to the rapid perfection of aviation during the war, military interest in pigeon photography faded and Neubronner abandoned his experiments. The idea was briefly resurrected in the 1930s by a Swiss clockmaker, and reportedly also by the German and French militaries. Although war pigeons were deployed extensively during the Second World War, it is unclear to what extent, if any, birds were involved in aerial reconnaissance.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Prior to World War I, “tall tale” postcards allowed smaller agrarian communities across the United States to brag about their agricultural prowess. These postcards featured cut-and-paste scenes of tiny humans wrangling with Brobdingnagian onions, geoducks, rabbits, and squashes. As the Wisconsin Historical Society explains of these images:

Since postcards eventually came to function as a surrogate for travel, the photographic images depicting a geographic location engendered a certain myth about that town or region, usually equating the land with an Arcadian utopia. These myths were often reaffirmed by the handwritten commentary on the reverse. In this way, postcard photographers frequently selected subjects that might further the pre-existing myth of a region - a myth which often directly contradicted reality. The most crafty photographers soon realized that this myth could be altered not only by manipulating the camera’s gaze, but by physically manipulating the photographs themselves, exploiting their ostensibly naïve depictions. Accordingly, nowhere did these modified narrative images, or “tall-tale postcards” as they came to be called, become more prevalent than rural communities hoping to forge a national identity for themselves as a place of agrarian abundance.

(Source: io9.com)

Sixty years before the embrace of collage techniques by avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolors are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects. Such images, often made for albums, reveal the educated minds as well as the accomplished hands of their makers. With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, these images stand the rather serious conventions of early photography on their heads. 

Images 1 and 2 Source : Image 4 Source : Image 5 Source : Image 6 Source

(Source: metmuseum.org)