Roland and Duggie in the water
By: usermattw
Tags: photography, swimwear, vintage photography
Click here to see it larger.
What it is:
Photo (approx 5 x 7 inches) in a cardboard frame (7.5 x 10.5 inches; I have cropped the damaged edges out of this scan).
What I know about it:
Stamped on the lower right corner of the frame is Mastercraft. Written in pen on the back is Roland + Duggie.
Comments:
One of my newest subscribers (and vice versa) is Ian over at Swimming In Pictures, who posts vintage photos of people in swimwear. So such photos were on my mind when the weather here suddenly turned all hot and summery this weekend (unusually hot for San Francisco), and I decided to celebrate it all with a swimwear photo. And a sweet photo, at that. Shall we assume Duggie is the child? I assume Mastercraft is a photo studio, but it struck me as an odd name for a photo studio, so I googled the word, and there are several with that name today, so it’s possible. It seems confusing since this isn’t a photo taken in a studio. But I have to remember that my grandfather had a photo studio, and if he bothered to take one of his non-studio photos and blow it up and frame it nicely, there was a chance he would have just used one of the mattes with his studio name. So maybe that’s what’s going on here. I’m also intrigued by what appears to be some sort of mesa on the horizon, past the figure wading in the distance. The implication is that our guys here are wading in a large lake, rather than the ocean. They seem to be having a good time, wherever they are. I wonder if this is Duggie’s first “swim”.
UPDATE: Per the comment below, I now think it’s just a wave in the background, breaking in such a way that the shadow looks like a distant mesa standing in a layer of haze. Kind of an optical illusion, at least to me. Embarrassing but funny. 🙂
Pics of Then 
It’s a wave in front of the other person.
Hmm, I think you may be right. Thanks for the second pair of eyes. This isn’t the first time I’ve posted a photo and been fooled by what I was looking at. 🙂
Definitely a wave. And one cute pair of gents. Father/son? Uncle/son?
Someone smitten with the boy, whatever his relationship.
Yes, it’s so obviously a wave now that it’s been pointed out to me. I wonder what’s wrong with my brain sometimes. lol Good question, I assumed father and son, but who knows. You’re right, though, there’s a mutual fondness, whoever they are.