Timeliness and Timelessness, or Spot the Wall Calendar

The following is a guest post by Kate Phillips, Reference Librarian, Prints & Photographs Division. 

As our name suggests, here in the Prints & Photographs (P&P) division, we collect both prints AND photographs. It’s always fun when items work across categories and photographs speak to print culture.  

This month, as we’ve turned the page to a new year, I’ve been playing “spot the wall calendar” while sifting through images in our collection. This form of printed matter is ubiquitous in photographs of early to mid-twentieth century interiors. At once utilitarian and decorative, wall calendars were an inexpensive (or free, in the case of advertising calendars) means of injecting a bit of art into the home. 

Today we’re highlighting photographs from two collections: the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) photographs by Lewis Hine and the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) black-and-white photographs, where a bit of close looking can yield some unexpected printed rewards. 

As part of his work documenting child labor in the United States, Lewis Hine photographed “homework” largely in the tenements of New York City, where families assembled artificial flowers, finished garments, and did other detail-oriented piecework. These photographs give us an intimate look at the homes of early twentieth–century immigrant families. 

Below, a mother stitches doll clothes while her husband and child look on. Also watching are a series of advertising calendars featuring portraits. Here, too, is a calendar featuring elaborate die-cut paper birds. Identifiable by the small hanging booklet of monthly pages below the larger image, in these calendars the main visual element remains static for the year, while pages of the booklet are torn off as the months progress. Presumably this family is sitting in front of a wall of Decembers. 

Like Hine, the photographers working for the FSA/OWI were given intimate access to the homes of their subjects and wall calendars are threaded throughout this collection too.  

A close look at the below Russell Lee photograph of a gold miner at home reveals five calendars. Morrell Meat’s calendar “Immortal Characters of Literature” hangs on the right, where characters from a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem welcome November 1937, the month the photograph was taken. Bracketed by a second food company calendar, the hanging mechanisms and uneven trims of the middle three items on the wall suggest that the two had once been calendars.  

This family poses in front of their calendar, almost as if the mother and child in the illustration have become members of the family. When you hang a wall calendar, you commit to living with its visuals for an extended period of time, building familiarity.   

Amazing digitization work by our colleagues in P&P allows us to view these images in incredible detail. I encourage you to download the high-resolution files and give them a close look. Here, I spy at least three calendars, plus a cornucopia of other printed matter, including valentines, postcards, and religious materials. In the lower left, we see an image of the Dionne Quintuplets, themselves the subject of an extremely popular series of annual calendars produced by an advertising company called Brown & Bigelow.  

This selection is only the tip of the iceberg of NCLC and FSA/OWI photographs where wall calendars make an appearance. Once you notice one or two, you begin to spot them everywhere. Please spend some time in these collections and let us know in the comments if you spot any more!  

Learn More:

• Explore the National Child Labor Committee Collection and the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.
• Browse through additional images related to calendars from the collections.
• Revisit a previous blog post on calendar art in our collection: Marking the New Year with an Old Calendar.
• Read another Picture This post featuring the meeting of prints and photographs: Posters Working Together.