Photo collection features old-timey Happy Mutants

Scroll through this set of black and white photos and you will find that our Great-Grandparents' generation was perfectly capable of letting their freak flags fly when they wanted. It starts off slow, with a stained mattress. But before long there's bear wrestling, toddlers smoking, comic misuse of med-school skeletons, and, well, this guy right here.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE: Vintage Weird • Weird

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burritoflats

I would chalk most of the poses in these photos up to plain old humour
and dressing up. Photographer’s studios back then (and sometimes now)
had closets full of props to amuse kids and imaginative adults
- Anonymous
  
  Like skeletons, bloody mattresses, fur suits, severed heads, guns, & wild animals. Yep, just regular photography studio props.
  - burritoflats
    
    “Yep, just regular photography studio props”
    
    Yes, just studio props. Or sometimes people
    would bring in their own special props – just like
    photo studios operate today. Photography was
    much more of a special thing at the turn of the Century
    and normal people would prepare for a photo shoot
    in a more thorough manner than today.
    
    There’s a great book out there (based on an 2004 exhibit
    at London’s National Portrait Gallery) by Tom Phillips
    called “We Are the People” that collects thousands
    of UK picture postcards mostly pre-1930. Much
    of the photography is similar in strangeness to that
    in this particular post. Studio photography is fascinating
    
    National Portrait Gallery – We Are the People – photo exhibit
    http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/20041/we-are-the-people.php
DieFem

Look at that poor womanÂ´s face!!!. She is saying “Dammit, I married this A-hole”. :)
blueelm

I recognize some of these. I’m pretty sure 10 is supposed to be Krampus maybe though. That makes me wonder about 46 since the goats head mask is similar. I’m guessing some kind of coven scene.

I recognize the ones with the women and the skeletons for certain and of course Pere Ubu.

I think my favorite is 35, because it looks like it was taken here last week outside of the Vera Bradley store.
- Jerril
  
  I sincerely doubt #46 is a “coven” – they’re wearing calculus dresses.
  - blueelm
    
    Are they or has that been scratched/drawn onto the surface of the image? It’s hard for me to tell.
RobertBigelow

If Charles Addams were a photographer, this would be the result.
Anonymous

They’re all brilliant. I keep going back to #9 featuring the panda as the goalie.
MarlboroTestMonkey7

#5 is clearly the Baron Vladimir Harkoneen and Alia, his granddaughter and executioner.
Anonymous

Just wtf is #31 supposed to be?

What should we worry about now? Is this a prohibition thing?
- adamnvillani
  
  “Just wtf is #31 supposed to be?”
  
  Pretty sure that’s a young armadillo, or at least something related to that.
  
  ‘Whatthemafukulator.’
  
  Did you just come up with this word? It makes me laugh.
Oskar

I suspect someone is testing the Doppler effect in picture 44.
Jake0748

These photos remind me of this book that one of my college roommates had:

http://www.amazon.com/Wisconsin-Death-Trip-Michael-Lesy/dp/0826321933

soooo creepy
Daddyology

#6 should’ve been on a Grateful Dead album cover. Just fantastic.

#12 is just … um … I’d make some sort of “cock” joke given there’s one in the picture, but … uh … not sure that’d pass moderation.(Oh, wait, I just did …)

#34: Welcome to Hannibal Lector’s House of Whores, where we put the lotion on its skin again and again!

The rest are just the awesomest ever.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to contact Matt Stopera over at BuzzFeed to find out where he’d like for us to deliver the Internets he has won.
Selkiechick

I am pretty certain I have seen #46 before, and that it is from a theatrical performance at a women’s college, Radcliffe or Wellesley or Mt. Holyoke.
MarlboroTestMonkey7

#24 Are you shitting me?
penguinchris

While I enjoyed them as a whole, a lot of these are really not that strange. And the sensationalist headline there – “unexplainable” photos – is pretty stupid. All of these are explainable (some more than others)!

My favorite is 38; because the girl is taking the classic “pointy bra under nicely draping sweater” look to the extreme (not to mention the huge vegetable).

I too think there’s something fishy about 47; it doesn’t feel right and looks modern, or heavily photoshopped in any case.
chawke

Maggie – another great post – thank-you for the link to the pictures. As other commenters have said, some things never change. Not exactly the same thing, but recall the murals in Pompeii, or more recently and more along the same idea, the bizarre theme couple and family portraits from the 80s?
nonie

Haha these are fantastic. Did 38 get posted here once before? Either way it’s hilarious!
Pirate Jenny

#28: the original Coin-Operated Boy!

I’ve seen #21 used as a projected backdrop for Miz Kitty’s Parlour (vaudeville-inspired live variety show) here in Portland.
Mark Frauenfelder

We can shut down Boing Boing for the rest of the year, since it’s clear that this will be the best post of 2011.
- kateling
  
  Agreed. This is possibly the best thing I have ever seen.
ROSSINDETROIT

These photos all seem to fall somewhere between David Lynch and Donald Roller Wilson. I’ll be sleeping under heavy sedation tonight.
Anonymous

I think we can safely say that #35 just proves that things never actually change.
irksome

Have a wtf day.
gwailo_joe

Totally loving this. . .

Ol’ Great Grandpa SteamHead was out-punking todays youth since nineteen ought etc. etc.

And the lil’ girl with piggy and umbrella is both cute and unsettling. . .then it gets weirder.

Please Elder Gods give me my current net worth in vintage currency with all that I know now and send me BACK! (yes, I want my current health, and a suit that wont scare the natives. . .)

I would have so much fun before I was arrested, institutionalized or married. . .
Anonymous

#49 makes me think of The Shining (novel, not movie).
planettom

I have to wonder if the diving helmet guy with the woman isn’t an attempt to recreate the scene from the 1894 John Kendrick Bangs ghost story “The Water Ghost.”

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/WateGhos.shtml

In it, a guy’s grandfather, father, are all killed by a curse and a ghost who comes and drips freezing water on them until they die. When his turn comes, he puts on an insulated diving helmet and suit, and defeats the ghost — it eventually freezes itself, leaving him unharmed, and he stores it in a refrigerated warehouse!
- Amphigorey
  
  Going by her hairstyle and gown, I’d say not. She looks more 1880s than 1890s to me.
  - gwailo_joe
    
    My take is that it is on purpose a particularly ‘old fashioned’ style of hair and dress with ‘crazy spaceman modern’ helmet and jumpsuit. . .
    
    Otherwise, why the rakish tilt to the eyepiece?
Anonymous

33 is very disturbing. Especially when you consider that picture’s setting, the only one where you can identify African Americans with some degree of certainty.
Anonymous

#46 College dream (or nightmare). Two young women students sleeping, surrounded by devilish black figures covered with mathematics terms and symbols. The items dangling from the waists of the looming ‘blackboards’ are pieces of white chalk on strings. (Which I’ve actually seen done once or twice in old photos of schoolrooms.) If this was a skit, it probably was a big hit — enough that commemorative pictures were demanded.
- blueelm
  
  That makes good sense!
lewis stoole

i like #26, the guy driving the whatthemafukulator
light years ahead of wussy hummers
- Milo
  
  ‘Whatthemafukulator.’
  
  The photo was funny, but this just turns it up to 11. I’m still laughing.
Anonymous

#23, the face of someone who’s regretting taking on that bet with his mates and is paying the forfeit.

A lot of LOLz to be had those photographs.
victorvodka

that was so good.
hubbledeej

#4 and #6 are from Library and Archives Canada, which is home to probably the largest documentary photography collection in the country. Claps to the good folks that helped build this wonderful & yes, sometimes weird collection. There are concerns that as the federal government continues to bleed this institution dry, the folks running the place will sacrifice “frills” like visual records from private sources. That would be a damn shame, and everyone should know it!
Zoman

#38~ Ruth Brand boots outsize pickle to start “National Pickle Week.”

Sauce: http://zoomar.tumblr.com/post/954797897/ruth-brand-boots-outsize-pickle-to-start-national
alrom

#31 is a Surrealist photo by Dora Maar.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2005.100.443
jfrancis

10 is the Krampus
Brucedene

#35 is actually from the Seattle Municipal Archives. I attracted the attention of a truly unhinged troll last year by intimating she had the face of a seventy-five-year-old woman.
Anonymous

The folks commenting on the site think #2 is about menarche. I think it’s murder. Somebody’s husband won’t be causing her any more problems. Great stuff!
Chentzilla

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this picture in a more or less recent computer game. Probably Sublustrum.
jfrancis

http://blackandwtf.tumblr.com/
franko

surprisingly, it’s the nude ones that i find the most incredible.
the Other michael

#33 is in a prison? Black inmates in barrels. White spectators. And… jars on some sort of course?
Anonymous

Then the aliens phoned home and said, “You have GOT to see this! We found this this planet, see…”
jjsaul

12 is Bill O’Reilly isn’t it? The infamous “glory hole rooster” incident that resulted in his falafel-shaped scar.
- holtt
  
  Some kind of cock and pullet story like that, yea.
Ipo

I love #43, the gay sailor brushing a mounted fox head which is clearly annoyed with friendly kitteh, in front of those massive martial twin phallic symbol cannons.
It is completely surreal – at the same time it is probably a snap shot. Somebody documenting a situation and setting that actually happened just so.
… stranger than fiction.

And #48 is deep.
irksome

Really? Nobody has said it yet? Really?

Ah well.

I, for one, welcome our incongruously-garbed 19th Century overlords.
Alvis

47 looks like it’s a modern photo. Tell from the pixels, and whatnot.
Alan

#35 was actually taken last week. It’s the mandated pose for every child’s school i.d. in Texas.
Tony Moore

i love those! #25 is straight up Gus from Jeff Lemire’s SWEET TOOTH comic.
Mark Crummett

Some of these look contemporary- 15, 36, 47 (too gratuitously weird), 48 maybe.

Some are just creepy. 20, guy with shotgun. That can only end badly.

My fav- diving suit! If only she was wearing goggles.

Least fav- 31 (yuck, whatever it is!)

wtf, but even more so- 10, 17, 23, 25?
MooseDesign

Should have… sent a poet…
Anonymous

I CAN EXPLAIN NO. 2!

Back in the day, it was of vital importance that the woman you marry was a virgin. One of the ways to prove this was to display her bloody mess after the wedding night.