Curator of Photography
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| 19th-century Christmas card, Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Christmas series, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. |
Holidays are always a logical, popular theme for Collections Search Center bloggers, and Smithsonian archival collections contain thousands of holiday-related images. This December I hoped to highlight several Archives Center collections that are rich with Christmas and New Year’s materials. The first one that sprang to mind was the Christina Patoski Holiday Photoprints, especially because I knew the collection contained an image related to Hanukkah (Chanukah) that I wanted to include. These colorful photographs of gaudy front-lawn and front-porch decorations, printed on Cibachrome (a favorite photographic paper during the “chemical photography” era due to its characteristic deep, brilliant color rendering), were exhibited in the National Museum of American History in 1993-1994, then acquired as a gift from the photographer.
My plan was thwarted when I discovered that none of these photographs had been scanned! Given pandemic restrictions and my telework situation, scanning them in order to include an example in this post was problematic. Nevertheless, I’ve included a “work-around” to highlight this collection.
Photographs by Stuart Cohen, created as a visual homage to his hometown, “Marblehead at the Millennium” (1999), include a view of children opening gifts on Christmas morning, as well as another of Santa Claus arriving in Marblehead, Massachusetts in a lobster boat, prior to his annual Christmas walk through the town. Beautiful black-and-white prints! You’ll have to take my word for that, as I was chagrined to discover that they had not been scanned either. Mea culpa!
Nevertheless, much of the Archives Center’s extensive holdings of holiday imagery has been digitized and can be found online. For example, the huge Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, with its hundreds of subject categories, is particularly rich in holiday imagery, including greeting cards, commercial advertising incorporating holiday themes, and gift wrap designs.
The Norcross Greeting Card collection is known for its “antique” greeting cards. Above is a card from Series 3, the Rust Craft Card Company Records, about 1920.
And a humorous (slightly naughty) card from 1929, below:
And two of Santa’s reindeer out for a drive, 1953:
The Bernard Levine Sample Book Collection contains colorful gift wrap designs. Below, however, is a bold black-and-white concept.
As a substitute for an Archives Center photograph of holiday displays by Christina Patoski, I offer one of her related images, featured on a web site from her exhibition at Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles, 2004: Put this in your browser:
http://www.archive.track16.com/exhibitions/xmas_04/02.html.
You can bet that one of my personal goals for the year is to scan the Patoski and Cohen photographic collections. Watch for examples in next year’s December holiday blog—as well as in SOVA before that.
I’m closing with an administrative note. As new Collections Search Center blog manager, I viewed 28 other Smithsonian blogs, and found that most provide author’s names and affiliations at the top, whereas the custom for this particular blog has long been to place them at the end of each post. With the blessing of the previous blog manager, I’ve made an executive decision to cite authorship at the top from now on. The fact that this change is being implemented with a post written by myself is sheer coincidence, and has nothing to do with my relentless search for personal fame and glory. Season’s greetings to all!