1950s

A Look Back at the Forgotten Art of Hand-Tinted Photography

This beautiful short film reminds us about a part of the photographic process that most of the people reading this will have never experienced: hand-tinting. Revisit the age of hand-tinted photography through the eyes of 83-year-old Grace Rawson, a professional colorist from the 1950s.

Rare Portraits of the Nigerian Royal Court from the Mid-1900s

Noted Nigerian photographer Chief S.O. Alonge was the very first indigenous photographer of the Royal Court of Benin in Nigeria, and for some five decades, he captured thousands of Kodak glass-plate negatives of the ritual, pageantry and regalia of the Nigerian obas (kings), their wives and retainers.

Now, these rarely seen images and the fascinating world they preserved are being pulled out of the archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art and shown to the world once more.

Fan Ho’s Fantastic Black-and-White Street Photographs of 1950s Hong Kong

Photographer Ho Fan has been shooting black and white street photography since the 1950s. At the time, he was living in the poor, rundown Central neighborhood of Hong Kong. The streets, filled with food and trinket vendors, captured the recent Shanghai transplant's attention. It was with this fascination that Fan took his camera to the streets, documenting the intriguing life around him.

Another Street Photographer Discovered, Captured Life in 1950s NYC

Frank Oscar Larson was an auditor living in Queens back in the 1950s who had a passion for street photography. Every weekend he would travel around the city armed with his Rolleiflex camera, photographing the things that caught his eye. After Larson died of a stroke at the age of 68 in 1964, his photographs quietly sat in a cardboard box for 45 years before finally being discovered by his son's widow in 2009. They offer a beautiful look into what life in NYC was like half a century ago.