Terrifying turnips
A terrifying example of a traditional Irish jack-o’-lantern carved from a turnip around 1850
Categories: Curiosities, Museums, Unsettling Things • Tags: carving, creepy, face, folklore, halloween, vegetable
Tag: face
Tony Fomison’s inner werewolf
Art and monsters are two of my all-time favorite things, so I’m in (weird, twisted) heaven when the two things combine. A strange, hairy beast lurks inside the soul of New Zealand artist Tony Fomison – head over to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa blog to read my full post about his remarkable paintings of hairy beasts. What does your inner monster look like? For New Zealand painter Tony Fomison (1939–1990) it was a creature drenched in darkness, […]
Categories: Contemporary Art, Curiosities • Tags: animal, art, curiosities, face, museum, new zealand, Tony Fomison, werewolf
Two-faced death ring
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: 17th century, death, face, gold, history, jewelry, memento mori, museum, ring, skull, unsettling
She lived inside someone’s locket
Categories: Curiosities, history • Tags: face, heart, love, nostalgia, photography, vintage
Adorable toddler mug shot
Alphonse Bertillon was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who was responsible for standardizing the modern mug shot. (Fun fact: the profile shot was included because Bertillon thought our ear shape might become a unique identifier, in the days before fingerprinting). This cute mug shot features his two-year old son François Bertillon, a hardened criminal who was caught nibbling all the pears from a basket on 17 October 1893. This mug shot is adorable, but it is also a […]
Categories: Curiosities, history • Tags: children, criminal, cute, face, humor, images, mug shot, photography, victorian era
Bizarre beauty contests
Categories: Curiosities, history • Tags: beauty, beauty pageant, body, contest, face, photography, unsettling, vintage
Morbid kidswear ads
If you haven’t already seen it, I strongly suggest you read about the fascinating Hidden Mothers phenomena in Victorian photography, and its possible relationship to the tradition of post-mortem photography. Amsterdam-based fashion photographers/artists Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm have put a morbid contemporary twist on the history of this imagery, recycling the aesthetic conventions of hidden mother and post-mortem photography into a commercial kid’s wear fashion shoot. In the first part of Blommers and Schumm’s ‘Kidswear’ series, an anonymous figure […]
Categories: Contemporary Art, history • Tags: art, body, children, face, hidden mothers, photography, unsettling, victorian era
Three ridiculously interesting photos for art history nerds
These three intriguing photographs have no real relationship with one another, except that each image reveals a little bit of the hidden history of art. Read on for more about these remarkable images. Picasso wearing a ‘cow head mask’, 1949 The first image is a light-hearted 1949 photograph of Pablo Picasso on a French beach, wearing what is described as a cow’s head mask. However, I believe that the image is mislabeled and that he is actually modelling a bull’s […]
Categories: history • Tags: American Gothic, art, artist, face, history, images, models, photography, Picasso, Robert Cornelius
Women Laughing Alone With Salad
Categories: Ideas • Tags: face, humor, laughter, photography, salad, stock photography, women
The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things 