Shorpy Shorpy Shorpy!

Yeah, say it: Shorpy. It just rolls off the tongue like honey: Shorpy.

So, what the hell is it?

Shorpy calls itself "The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog", and that is about as apt a subtitle as you can get. It is a blog, and on it people post "vintage" photographs, usually between 100 and 70 years old. These are not the crappy, flea-market quality snapshots, however; the photos uploaded to Shorpy are intended as both entertainment and art.

Usually, the photos depict either some sort of candid situation of daily life, or a posing subject in his "natural habitat". The goal here is to display what life was like in this not-so-distant past, and elicit a certain empathy from the viewer.

Many of these photos are powerful, moving, beautiful, and/or troubling. This one, of a small shop in 1938 Key West, is telling for it's main protagonist: the man on the left, obviously past his prime, but with one more crutch and one fewer leg than normal. One can assume, based on his age, that he lost that leg in World War I.

This one, one of the rare few in color, is a beautiful landscape of a Chicago Railroad yard in 1942 - the very pinacle of the Railroad Era. With a landscape made entirely of trains and cars, and the engines spewing steam like man-made clouds, this image is representative of peak of the steam-epoch, and also a lament for its passing.

Some other favorites of mine: Solomon the Newsie, 1909. Clerk 37, 1942. Rural Mother, 1936.

So, why is it named Shorpy? Well, the blog gets its title from a man named "Shorpy" Higginbotham who, as a boy as young as fourteen, worked in a coal mine in Alabama. His real name was Henry Sharp Higginbotham, and he later served in World War I. He died in 1927 in a coal mine, crushed by a rock.

In 1910, when Shorpy was fourteen and working in the mine, a photographer named Lewis Wickes Hine visited and took some photographs. To our knowledge, only four images of Shorpy survive from this time, and they are eerily haunting. His face seems that of a man much older, cynical, dour. His hands are huge, and his arms are deformed from carrying heavy grease containers during his physically formative years. He is child labor, he is the ultimate end of 19th century business.

In just four images, this mysterious boy nicknamed "Shorpy" embodies both a fantastical past that seems far removed from our modern lives, and a very real, human, mortal past that still haunts us today. That's the draw of Shorpy, and his blog.