Toxic Clowns, Grandpa’s Underwear and Matchbox Cars: Found Kodachrome Photos from the 1970s

These found Kodachrome photograph from the 1970s are the second instalment from collector Thomas Hawk. His 1960s Kodachrome pictures were a treat, and now we move on a decade. We’ve started with the above picture of a circus clown. The effect of the lurid colours, that little wave and the suit of hairy man-made fibres are exaggerated by the depth of Kodachrome, just as we have seen in previous great albums from the circus (here and here) from the 1950s.

We’ll follow with two pictures from a set of BMX riders in 1976. and there are CB radios, lots of big cars, trips to a Denny’s restaurant in Pennsylvania, a Service Station in El Camino, California and wonderful view down on the streets of Paris, France. And we’re inside American homes, with their wood-pannelled walls, big TVs and magazine racks.

 

“Sometimes I like to think of myself as a photography factory,” says Thomas. “I see my photographs mostly as raw material for projects that might be worked on at some point later on in life…

“I’m trying to publish a library of 1,000,000 hand crafted, lovingly created, individually finished and processed photographs before I die. Mostly I’m focusing on America. The absurdity of my obsessive view on photography is not lost on me – but it is the absurdity of life that I find most beautiful of all. Where Sisyphus had his stone I have my camera and a bag full of lenses.

“Document, explore, lather, rinse, repeat. Photography for me then becomes a kind of hyperactivity, loosely arranged and presented. My work is less about individual images and instead more about the power of a massive amount of excessive and disjointed images where stories, characters and places sometimes stay and other times reappear or disappear entirely for no good reason at all…

“I collect photography books, postcards and vernacular found photographs.