Vintage Athletes - Part 40

 Muybridge - Other Athletics

We continue our look at the stop-motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge, published in his 1887 book Animal Locomotion. Muybridge did his work at the University of Pennsylvania, and his subjects were mostly students, graduates, or teachers at the university.  Today we look at some miscellaneous sports.

Each plate in Animal Locomotion consists of a series of photos taken at split-second intervals.  I made all of the gifs in this post from the photos on the plates.

We begin with football.  Above is plate 300, called "Foot-ball drop kick."  The model is model 63, who has not been identified.

This is another view of plate 300, "Foot-ball drop kick."  Muybridge often took photographs from two different angles.

This is Plate 301, called "Foot-ball punt."  The model is again model 63, who is unidentified, but presumably he was a Penn student who played football.

Note that the ball is more or less round.  In the 1880s, when Muybridge was taking these photos, football was evolving from a rugby-like game into the modern American game, largely due to changes introduced by Walter Camp of Yale, the "father of American football".  The modern-shaped ball was not developed until after 1906, when the forward pass was legalized, making passing as important as running the ball and kicking.

Above is plate 154, called "Jumping; running straight high jump."  The model is model 26, unidentified, but probably a Penn track and field athlete.

This is plate 165, pole vaulting.  The model is model 46, Jacob K. Shell.  He's not vaulting over a bar here, just demonstrating how to vault for Muybridge's cameras.

Above is Dr. Jacob K. Shell (1862-1940) later in life.  He was a talented football player at Penn, lettering four times in the late 1870s and early 1880s.  He graduated with a degree in medicine and dentistry.

This is plate 294, called "Lawn Tennis; serving."  The model is model 25, Morris Hacker, Jr.  This is one of the most widely reproduced gifs from Muybridge's book.

Like many of the plates in the book, plate 294 shows the action from two different angles.  Here's the seldom-seen rear view of Morris Hacker, Jr. serving at tennis.

This is Morris Hacker, Jr. in 1890, a few years after Muybridge's photos of him.  Hacker was on the Penn baseball team, and Muybridge also photographed him batting and pitching.

There are a couple of other plates showing tennis.  This is plate 486, called "Lawn tennis," with model 102, unidentified.

We end with plate 488, also called "Lawn tennis," with model 96, unidentified.

Ivy League Posture Photos - Part 16

Ivy League Posture Photos

Yale started taking nude photos of incoming freshmen in 1919 as part of a program to detect and correct posture problems.  The Yale photos have erroneously been associated with William Sheldon, a psychologist at Harvard and author of Nazi-like eugenic theories who used Harvard nude posture photos to illustrate his theory of somatypes.  But, as far as I can tell, the Yale photos are not connected to Sheldon's work.

Here are five more posture photos taken at Yale that I had the opportunity to acquire.  For privacy reasons, I redact the names of men who might still be alive.  Two of these men have passed away, so their names are not redacted.

This is Yale freshman Muller Davis on Oct. 12, 1953.

An article in the Journal of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation described how in spring, 1952, Yale installed an apparatus using mirrors to produce "PhotoMetric" posture photos like this showing front, rear, side and top views.

This is Yale freshman George E. Doty III on Oct. 16, 1953.

Note the strange pins stuck to each student's back and chest.  The pins were stuck on at specific points for later posture analysis.  Supposedly, by examining the angles formed by connecting the points where the pins touched the body, certain posture problems could be detected.

This is Yale freshman L.D. on Oct. 12, 1953.

This is Yale freshman R.D. on Oct. 16, 1953.

This is Yale freshman W.E. on Oct. 19, 1953.

Were these photos an invasion of privacy for the students?  By today's standards, yes.  By the standards of the day, not so much.  In that era, guys were routinely naked around each other in locker rooms and in swimming pools when women weren't present.  Being asked to strip and even being photographed naked as part of a posture examination would not seem too outrageous, since the staff conducting this was all-male (and remember that Yale was an all-male school).

Some of my followers have questioned the propriety of publishing these photos, since the students did not give consent for their publication.  My reply:

1. I only publish the names of students who have died.  To protect their privacy, I have redacted the names of students who may still be alive (despite the fact that their names have already been published on an online auction site).  Legally, the right to privacy does not extend beyond death, i.e. it does not extend to spouses, children, grandchildren, etc. of the deceased person.

2. In my opinion, publishing these photos is similar to publishing nude photos of athletes and soldiers taken by LIFE magazine photographers.  At the time, the understanding of the photo subjects was that photos with frontal nudity would never be published in the magazine (and they never were), but the LIFE photo archive containing those photos is now publicly available online, and nobody seems to be complaining about it.

3. I consider these photos to be a historical record of the time.  Almost all of the Ivy League posture photos were burned when their existence became widely known.  In my opinion, that was akin to book-burning of books that someone claimed were obscene.  These photos are not obscene.  They should be celebrated, not hidden away.

The Naked Farmer - Part 13

New South Wales

We continue our series of photos by Australia's Naked Farmer, Ben Brooksby, who posts photos of naked Australian farmers to get attention for his mission to promote mental health.

Today's photos are from the state of New South Wales.  For my non-Australian followers, NSW doesn't mean Not Safe for Work (although that's true, too).  It's the abbreviation for New South Wales.  Above, that's a lot of hay in Walgett, NSW.

A farmer atop a water tank or silo in Coleambally, NSW.

A cotton field in Coonara-Carrathool, NSW.

Cutting firewood in Attunga, NSW.

The Deni Ute Muster, a gathering of utes (utility vehicles) and their owners in Deniliquin, NSW.  There's no frontal nudity in these photos because the Naked Farmer posts these photos on Facebook, which doesn't allow it.

A doorway in Wilcannia, NSW.

Dubbo, NSW.  I love Australian place names.

Ebor Falls, NSW.

We end with four smiling guys and their sheep in Armidale, NSW.

Boys and Their Balls - Part 35

 Crystal Balls

Today, we're looking at a different kind of balls – crystal balls.  

This photo was called "The Seer," but I have to say that his crystal ball doesn't look very magical.  It looks like a snow globe.

Here's Nathaniel holding what looks more like a regulation crystal ball.

As does this one.  Michael is looking into it, but you might be looking at what's down below.  His see-through costume is partly hiding him; however there's a shadow that B.D. might appreciate.

So, what are they seeing in their crystal balls?  Maybe something like this ...

Or something like this ...

Or maybe something like what Harry Potter and Ron Weasley are seeing in their Divination class.  Click on it for a larger image.  Is it Dumbledore and Grindelwald, who were lovers in their youth?  Ron doesn't look too impressed, but Harry is fascinated.

(The original image just showed a murky white cloud, but I was able to summon up this vision with a little Photoshop magic.  I feel like a wizard.)

Estonian Photos - Part 1

 Estonian Photos

I have been publishing Ivy League (Yale) nude posture photos, and there are more to come.  Similar photos were taken by the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy in the 1940s to document incoming recruits.

Above is a photo taken by the Army at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, a processing center for Army recruits during World War II.

This photo of Navy recruit J. W. King was taken at the pre-flight training school at St. Mary's in California.  I have collected all the Fort Sheridan and St. Mary's nude photos that I could find, a few dozen each.

So you can imagine my delight when a friend in San Francisco told me about a collection of similar photos from a museum in Estonia.  The collection contains photos of hundreds of young men, photographed from the front ...

the rear ...

and the side.  The pole in the middle is for measuring their height; the markings are every 5 centimeters.  None of the men are identified by name, just by number.

The photos can be downloaded in extremely high resolution, such as the one above (click on the photo above for a larger image), and I downloaded a few that way, but that took forever (several minutes per photo, because they were so huge).  So most of these photos are medium-resolution images.

Who are these guys, and when were the photos taken?  The Estonian source provided no information.  My friend guessed that they are military recruits, which makes sense given their uniformly young age.  The photos may have been taken not to evaluate posture, like the Yale posture photos, but to document the physical condition of the incoming recruits, like the U.S. Army and Navy did.

The photos probably date from between World War I and World War II, when Estonia was an independent country.  Before WWI, Estonia was part of Imperial Russia, and after WWII it was part of the Soviet Union until the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

In some of the photos, like this set, the guys' faces and hands are dark.  My friend thought they were farm boys with tanned faces and hands, but it doesn't look like a tan to me.  The faces and hands look dirty, like what you see on coal miners.  There are no coal mines in Estonia, but there are oil shale mines, or the guys may have been working at some other dirty job.

This guy, number 723, is the last one in the set of Estonian photos, but never fear, I have hundreds more.

All three of these images of number 723 are high-resolution, so click on them for a larger view.

And if any of you have any information about these Estonian photos, please let me know.

Weighing In - Part 37

Vicente Saldivar

Vicente Saldivar (1943-1985) was a Mexican boxer who held the world featherweight championship from 1964 until his retirement in 1967.  The video clip above is Saldivar weighing in to defend his title in London on Sept. 7, 1965 against Howard Winstone.  Saldivar won.

Note the large all-male audience at the start of the clip.  In 1965 Britain, nobody saw the need for a privacy towel with an all-male audience.

Photographers - Part 37

Matthew Papa

New-York-based photographer Matthew Papa was born in 1967 in Detroit.  He said that the self-portrait above is one of his most popular photos.  Strangely, it is often seen on explicit porn sites.  Evidently the photo has an appeal that goes beyond raw sex.

Not that Matthew has anything to hide.  His own website is full of nude self-portraits, like the one above, called For You, For Me, 2012.

This picture, called Hawaii 50, shows Matthew and his lover on a trip to Hawaii in 2017 to celebrate Matthew's 50th birthday.

Here they are again in a photo called Tan lines on the day before we head back north.

Not all of his photos are self-portraits.  This one is called I am what I am and tha's all I yam, 2015.

This one shows two guys in a hammock getting busy with their hands.

This is John, 2015.

But Matthew keeps coming back to the self-portrait.  This is Self-portrait with Jerome, 2016.

An untitled self-portrait from the rear, making a muscle.

In this self-portrait, it looks like he's floating.

We end with another photo that's not explicit, yet it's very evocative.  Someone was in the bed on that side, but now they're gone.  It's up to you to imagine what happened.

You can see more of Matthew Papa's photos on his website www.matthewpapaphoto.com.