VINTAGE: Photographs In Old Cookbook

Odd things fall out of vintage cookbooks. Former old bookmarks made from greetings card, yellowed church service programs, wrinkled torn out recipes from newspapers to magazines, sometimes the odd photograph. More often than not there's never a reference, any description to the photograph - faces, place and events lost in time. I've taken to sharing them on my instagram because, well to me, they deserve to be shared.

A cover-less, title-less cookbook out fell an old passport photograph and tickets for a showing of Dumbo. The darkness of her lips, I can only imagine how dark and red her lipstick was!

The sticky backing of a cut out photograph found itself stuck in place in the index of an old Alice Bradley menu cookbook. I imagine it being an image capturing a couple looking down cutting a cake, an anniversary perhaps.

Then there is the photograph that started it all. When it came to unpacking a box of stock after moving, there in the bottom of a box two photographs had slide out from the pages of a cookbook - which I'll never know. Upon the reverse and along the white space of the bottom edge, a notation - revealing the names of those pictured including a Mr Ivan Harold Browning. 

An old handwritten note graces the photographs reverse - "The Brownings lived in London for more than 20 years. He was orginally one of the four Harmony Kings. He often works in pictures now". The penner notating for themselves the need for "two of these photographs" - one for them, another for Maurice (sp) - the lady to the far right of the image.

Not much can be gleamed from the internet about Browning, but enough for an outline, a mention on IMDB and a clip catching him signing upon YouTube. He was born in Brenham, Texas in 1891 and was part of the aforementioned Four Harmony Kings - a religious harmony group which formed in 1916 and appeared in vaudeville shows and continued their popular run into the 1920's. In addition, Browning appeared in Blake and Noble Sissies celebrated all black Broadway Show - Shuffle Along in 1921 and later stared in movies including Sunrise at Compobele (1960), Mr Peabody and the Mermaid (1948) and The Narrow Margin (1952). He died in California aged 87 in 1978.

And then he stood "on the terrace" all smiles. It makes you wonder the link between the photographer, the person who penned the note, how they knew Browning, how the photograph turned up in an old cookbook.

All the photographs are framed together on my desk. Some of them may be nameless, but they all have stories and I like to wonder what they all were.