In the Weirdest Places
We admit it—we loved our March/April cover girl. What we didn’t know was how much everyone else did, too.
“When I saw the cover, I let out a scream because the girl on the cover is an old, old friend …”
“Where did you get the photo?”
“The woman on the cover is my mother.”
Wait a minute—our cover girl has a story? The fact was confirmed for us by none other than the freshly uncovered cover girl herself, Claire Kipnis—friend, mom, and former model—who spends more time behind the camera today than in front of it.
We had questions. When was the photo taken? Why was she vacuuming a toaster? Are there more photos of her ready to resurface? As it turns out … well, she just had no idea.
Claire was able to tell us that the photo was taken between 1952 and 1958, when she was a model living in New York, “but I don’t remember that photo shoot,” she admitted. While she has a scrapbook full of personal photos from that time in her life, this is the only professional one she knows of to surface anytime in the last 50 years.
We’re pretty certain there are more photos of Claire sitting in stock photo collections just waiting to be found. That got us thinking—could someone else’s relative be out there, too?
Definitely. To find out if your relative is, take a free look through the following sites, each with historic photo collections. Don’t expect to find a relative by name, unless you’re related to someone who was very famous. Do expect to search through wonderful photos from both advertisement and editorial (newspaper and magazine) collections. And to have a lot of fun looking.
The Ancestry Store Photo Collection from Pictopia
www.theancestrystore.com
Getty Images Retrofile Collection
www.gettyimages.com
Jupiter Images Think Stock Collection
(see “historic” categories)
www.jupiterimages.com
Historic Photo Archive
www.historicphotoarchive.com
Library of Congress American Memory Collection
http://memory.loc.gov
New York Times Photo Archive
www.nytstore.com
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My children were in a photo that a company took in Wal Mart when they were kids. I never did get the photo and they claimed it was lost. Well the kids were so cute with us in family group and I went to alot of trouble to color code them for the setting.
So it must be why we didn’t get that picture back..I suspect its roaming around somewhere in California or some other state making mom’s and dadd’s want one like that.
So odd that the photo was never found.