Sunday, May 28, 2017

Nearly a century before LOLCATS there was Harry Whittier Frees






























































Many of us are familiar with humorous (LOL = laugh out loud) images of cats with silly captions. The Wikipedia article about LOLcats shows a 1905 postcard of a costumed cat created by the American photographer Harry Whittier Frees (1879 – 1953). Some of his images like the three from 1914 shown above: Fire, A Hungry Bunch, and The Nurse can be found at the Library of Congress web site, and 22 others are at Wikimedia Commons.

William Wegman is another more recent photographer noted for his animal images, mainly his Weimaraners with deadpan expressions. You can see ten of his images in a September 29, 2014 CNN article by  Emanuella Grinberg titled  William Wegman: Why dogs are such a draw. Wegman produced some of them using a 20”x24” Polaroid camera.  

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