Vintage Animal Oddities, Staged Scenes and Fatal Fall Photos, 1850s-1980s

**chris** · #1 ● 11-28-2012, 10:56 AM

The vintage black-and-white photographs span more than a century of animal oddities, staged scenes and unusual public spectacles. They include uniformed men wrestling a large snake, a poodle walking on its front legs, a goat standing on a giant tortoise, a giraffe nuzzling a hippopotamus and a London police officer holding a gate for a duck and her ducklings. Other scenes show policemen playing accordions for a girl, soldiers forming a human chain, a sailor surrounded by women in 1920s bathing suits and an exhausted couple at a 1930s dance marathon.

The older images include a 19th-century lithograph of a dog killing rats in a pit. Robert Doisneau's 1934 photograph "Les Frères" shows two boys performing handstands on a Paris street. A later sequence records a fatal fall from an upper window, followed by views of the person on the pavement as bystanders react.