The Library of Congress has released loads of photos on Flickr. My favorite is this set of color photos from the 1930s and 1940s. I’ve seen very little if any color photography from that era. It all looks like it was shot 20 years later than it was.

It’s curious to me how film quality affects our perception of time periods. I always pictured the pre-1960 world as black and white, then a sort of off-kilter Technicolor world before film started to look more “normal” in the 1980s. Oddly enough, I always pictured the pre-photographic world as the random illustrations and paintings that appeared in textbooks.

It’s also interesting seeing all the horses and wagons. For whatever reason I always imagined the automobile being ubiquitous after 1920 or so.