Friday 7 June 2024

Google Lens and provenance

 I'm a sucker for stories about weird and wonderful objects found in library books and the like, so I was amused by the story of the finding of a photograph of a semi nude young woman in the 1898 excavation diary of Bernard Pyne Grenfell, one of the principal discoverers of the Oxyrhyncus Papyri.

The author of the original blog post points out that the hairstyle of the young woman is one associated more with the 1920's than the 1890's (if you want to have a look at the image you will need to click through to the original blog post).

At the same time I've been playing with Google Lens to help find the provenance of historical images, so on a whim, I decided to use Google Lens to identify the image.

This is not something that could have been done at the time of the original blog post - reverse image search tools such as Lens were not in common use and museums and picture sharing sites had not put their collections online to anything like the extent they have now.

Given the subject matter, as expected a Lens search brought up various online collections of vintage erotica - apparently this is a thing - and a number of companies, principally on Etsy, offering to sell high quality reproductions of the image suitable for framing - apparently this too is a thing.

However, the Etsy connection was useful, it identified the work as being by Albert Arthur Allen a well known 1920s photographer of female nudes who mostly worked in California.

The image concerned is usually dated to around 1929, however it was possibly taken earlier, but as Allen worked in the 1920s it certainly wasn't taken at the time of Grenfell's excavation diary. 

In fact given that Grenfell died in 1926 and his papers were passed to the Egypt Exploration Society on his death it's entirely possible that someone other than Grenfell was responsible for slipping the image into his diary, perhaps as a bookmark ...


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