Thursday, January 03, 2008

Say cheesey

A few years ago, I kept getting annoying sales calls from an Olan Mills portrait studio. They insisted that I had been a past customer of theirs, which was completely untrue -- I knew people who had their high-school senior pics taken by Olan Mills, but at my school, you could go anywhere, and I never went to Olan Mills. So quit calling me, Olan! Lose my number, already, sheesh!

That's a random way of introducing this great Metafilter find, hilarious vintage portraits from Olan Mills (and other studios), complete with snarky commentary.

I kind of feel bad for anyone who might find their photo here, but the photos are so old that even the subjects of the pics probably regret their hair and clothing choices by now (as do all of us who lived through the 1970s and 1980s).

The best picture is the family with the Afroed baby, four photos down: "That dude wore a tie for nothing." The baby reminds me of Earl Junior from "My Name Is Earl," which I watch a lot of these days while rocking Kelly to sleep. (Highly, highly recommended show, by the way.)

Why do I feel like a lot of these pics would appear in the newspaper as someone's last known photograph?

5 comments:

Katie said...

I'm just glad my family's olan mills photo circa 1988 didn't make it on that list! It was horrific.

Anonymous said...

The last picture on that post is Ree of thepioneerwoman.com fame! She posted about it on her blog.

Cary McNeal said...

Thanks, Gael, for the shout-out and the link.

carymc
List Of The Day

Anonymous said...

I feel terrible for laughing, but I needed a laugh after reading the Indianapolis Monthly story.

Anonymous said...

Oh god that was hysterical. My favorite was "thoughtful Lance / mirthful Lance." I'm surprised the pictures our church had taken in the early 80's didn't make the page. My mom still has the shot of her and I hidden deep in the back of a frame somewhere. Ghastly.