Today’s POTW comes from a collection I discovered when it was requested by a researcher. It is one of the many at CBH that is not digitized so can only be appreciated in person.
I was originally struck by the album because it is constructed in a way I have never seen, with multiple photographs attached to a page by tabs which hold them in offset stacks, like shingles on a roof. It is an ingenious way to store quite a few photographs overlapping in a compact way in a small book. A colleague agreed she had never seen this in older collections, though we have all seen them in more contemporary examples.
The snapshots hang from a row of hinged tabs that display them overlapping down the page, like shingles on a roof, so browsing the album is a little like a treasure hunt or an advent calendar, you discover surprises as you move through them.
The collection includes this photograph album dating from circa 1900 to 1917 that includes 249 black and white photographs of young friends of Charles Blieffert in the Coney Island, Sheepshead Bay, and Brighton Beach neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
And among the seaside snaps are some poetic and artfully staged portrait photos.
The collection finding aid give us a little biographical information on the compiler.
Charles (Karl) Blieffert was born on May 10, 1891 in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. His mother and father immigrated to the United States from Nuremberg, Germany. The family lived at 18th Avenue near Gravesend Avenue where Charles spent his childhood. He was the only child. While working in a Milwaukee insurance company during the Great Depression, he met his future wife Helene. They married after the death of both of Charles' parents. Charles and his wife spent their summers at a fisherman's lake cottage in Wisconsin. He died in May of 1984, at age 92. He Americanized his birth name "Karl" to "Charlie" and pronounced his last name "Bly-furt" rather than "Blee-furt."
Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We welcome appointments to research our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.
This blog post reflects the opinions of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of Brooklyn Public Library.
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