This Sepia Saturday featured a group of men standing with golf clubs. None of my family were golfers (poor coal miners seldom have the time or money for golf), so I was a little stumped. In a flurry of scanning over the past few weeks, I came to this photo of three men all neatly lined up on their bikes and I thought, “AH! There’s my image for the prompt this week!” It may not be a sport per se, since in Holland it’s more a method of transportation than a sporting activity, but I thought it would fit well here. On the left is Doede Jaarsma (1911-1995) somewhere in the north of the Netherlands. The back of the photo is labelled, “Douglas and Friends,” and was probably written on after he took on the Americanized name of Douglas once arriving in the USA. The photo looks more like it was taken about 1930 when he was a younger man, so I have to assume it was either in/around Tjerkgaast in Friesland or in/around Uithuizen in Groningen. Two of the three men have one hand in a coat pocket, and the trees have no leaves, so I have to imagine it was a mighty chilly day to be on a bike. It’s really a brilliant photo and they’re captured while riding and not while standing still which is pretty neat (and tough to do with those old cameras).
The bicycles are all lined up so neatly it almost looks choreographed. What a treasure.
What a great photo! How wonderful to have such family treasures.
This is an incredible photo.
They do look cold!
That IS pretty clever photography! I’ve never seen one with everybody actually in motion!
Great photo and I’m so glad it’s a relative as well. Don’t you wonder who the photographer might have been?
Absolutely! If this was taken closer to his childhood home, the photographer could have been a brother. I do have another similar photo that was taken by an actual studio so I wonder if maybe traveling photographers set up to do these on purpose since they seem to have been fairly popular in Holland.
Great Photo! And yes it does look cool!
If it’s choreographed they even lined up in size.
It is quite wonderful how they are aligned and moving. And how fast was the photographer backing up to get this? Was the person on foot or in a car? Fascinating shot to ponder.