I have recently discovered the work of prolific Boston-area photographer Arthur Griffin (1903-2001), who was the exclusive photographer for the Boston Globe Rotogravure Magazine and photojournalist for Life and Time magazines for a good part of the twentieth century. There’s an entire museum in Winchester, Massachusetts dedicated to his work, and thousands of images have been digitized at the Digital Commonwealth. Griffin was a pioneer in the use of color film, but I love his black-and-white but still very bright pictures of Salem in the 1940s and 1950s because they depict a place that was decidedly not Witch City. There’s not a witch to be found in his photographs of the perfect Pickering House, the various house museums of the then-Essex Institute (now Peabody Essex Museum) and the House of the Seven Gables: instead we see well-dressed tourists and guides garbed, for the most part, in “colonial” dress. I always like to see occasions of colonial dress-up, and these photographs depict a decidedly mid-century display.
Visiting the Pickering House; Pioneer Village with the extant Arbella; the Retire Becket House at the House of the Seven Gables; inspecting the hearth and bed hangings at the John Ward House; a nice shot of the Solomon Chaplin House on Monroe Street.
March 24th, 2015 at 7:16 am
It’s astonishing how similar that shot with the boat looks to the countryside around Suffolk and Norfolk in England. It’s easy to see how immigrants from the “old country” would have felt at home very quickly in their new abode.
March 24th, 2015 at 7:27 am
Yes, Alastair–I don’t know if you’ve been here, but Essex County (of which Salem is the county seat) always strikes me as very East Anglian if you look at the (conserved) terrain rather than the architecture.
March 24th, 2015 at 7:19 pm
The hearth, I’m fairly certain, is from the old John Ward House where Sarah Symonds had her first artist studio. Here’s a pic of a one of her bas reliefs of that very photogenic and interesting hearth. Every time I look at it I yearn to sit next to it’s blazing fire on a gloomy day.
http://i58.tinypic.com/2dgn5ub.jpg
March 24th, 2015 at 7:54 pm
Thanks Peg—I thought it might be the kitchen of Crowninshield Bentley–don’t know why I wrote Gardner Pingress!
March 24th, 2015 at 8:06 pm
I’m glad you did! It made me refresh my memory. Now I’ll be daydreaming about that cozy hearth all day and hopefully it will carry on to my dreams where I’ll be sitting on that high backed bench working on some art or sorting out herbs or some such thing.
March 24th, 2015 at 7:38 pm
I found another picture of the hearth in my files. See the gizmo with the gears above the hearth on the left? It’s a roasting jack for rotating meat on a spit.
http://i62.tinypic.com/259ieqo.jpg
March 24th, 2015 at 7:55 pm
Thanks Peg!
March 25th, 2015 at 7:11 am
Wow, I just love these! Thanks so much for sharing.
March 25th, 2015 at 2:50 pm
I was just giving my adult education class on pirates another view of Salem last night: privateering in the Revolution and War of 1812. Just so you know that we know it’s not ALL witches!
March 26th, 2015 at 2:56 pm
Thank you, thank you, thank you…….