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Personal photography provides snapshot glimpses of our daily lives. For more than a century, countless personal photographs have informally documented special events and meaningful moments—an important part of the Unknown Museum. Mickey McGowan acquired the bulk of objects in the museum, including snapshot photographs and personal cameras, from sources throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. To McGowan, these personal photographs represent the diverse individuals, families, and friends who originally owned items in the Unknown Museum’s collection. Personal cameras trace back to 1900, when Eastman Kodak debuted the world’s first affordable camera, the ingeniously simple Brownie. They also made compact folding Brownies, such as the Vest Pocket Model B on display that McGowan glued into a copy of Kodak’s How to Make Good Pictures. This book is from a series that he exhibited at SF Camerawork in the early 1980s. McGowan first assembled Suitcase with Cameras at the Unknown Museum in 1984, modifying it for the museum’s subsequent locations. The image at right shows the giant Instamatic 104 advertising model on view in this exhibition when it was displayed in the Unknown Museum’s front window at 39 Corte Madera Avenue in Mill Valley. "The fate of the future, lies hidden in the past." —Mickey McGowan, December 2022 A very special thank you to Mickey McGowan for making this exhibition possible. See “Recollections… from the Unknown Museum” on display, post-security, in Terminal 2. https://bit.ly/UnknownMuseum
This image was posted on October 25, 2023.