the wanderer...

hitting the road again for some site specific performances in philadelphia (fortunately no funny hat, and i'm not walking, but i will be carrying a lot of my gear on my back...).

i'll probably post some images and text while i'm gone next week related to the site and its history - the 1830's girard college for orphans, designed by architect thomas u. walter, who also designed the dome for the us capital building.

if anyone is in the area and interested in coming to the performance, info can be found here.

before moondog...

great 1900 candid photograph of a one man band, who seems to have wandered in front of a family being photographed...

when farmers build instruments...

two RPPC's of alfred nelson, on the back of one is written:

alfred nelson from buffalo min. a plain farmer. plays 32 pc. or. took him 39 years to build it. july 6, 1941

a musical wonder returns...

a little over a year ago (august 29th 2006 to be exact), i posted some images of CDVs of one man bands and their musical contraptions from the victorian era (click here to see that original post). some were stamped with a performer's name, but one of the images had no printed text or information other than a messy signature on the back that reads something like "chisolm".

last week, i found another photo of him! it's clearly from the same photographer and came from the same studio. of course, these guys traveled the country doing performances and demonstrations and handed their pictures out as promotion or sold them as souvenirs; but i can't imagine "chisolm, the musical wonder" had more than 20 of these made....

since i've been collecting photos, i've been amazed by a number of finds like this, where things that have been separated for about a hundred years have found their way back to each other. the above image is the new photo, and you can click here to see the older one.

before rauchenberg...

nice little RPPC of whistling rufus one man band from around 1915. i love the odd placement of the smaller negative within postcard size paper and the large hand scrawled text. reminds me a lot of some of rauchenberg's silkscreen works from the 70's... and of course you have to love the GIANT harmonica.

one man drum and bugle corps...