Nobody seems to know who came up with the idea of “paper moons,” those kitschy photo booths at carnivals and vacation destinations in which people sit inside the curve of a crescent moon and smile for the camera. The tourist-trappy phenomenon originated in about the 1870s and was popular, on and off, until the 1950s, peaking around 1910.
Paper moon photos have become a charming relic of the past, selfies before there were selfies, memorialized in the 1933 song that croons “Say, its only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea, but it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me.”
An exhibit of 425 photos at Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London recalls those bygone days. Connecticut College art-history Professor Christopher Steiner teaches classes in bad art and collects photos with paper moons and other souvenir snapshot clichés.
“I’m fascinated by outsider art, vernacular art, what’s outside the canon of art history,” Steiner says. “Not all art was created by great artists and great photographers.”
He’s also fascinated by the irony of paper moons. “We finally have photography to capture reality, but there is so much fakery,” he says.
The names of the photographers who created the paper moons are lost to history, and many places where photos were taken are unknown. Others have telltale signs: embossings that place the location at Coney Island, Myrtle Beach, the 1901 Pan Am Expo in Buffalo. But it isn’t necessary to know where they were shot to be delighted by the array of silly and serious poses by men, women, children, all dressed for a nice day out. Two girls wear dancing costumes. A woman smokes seductively. A woman in a gypsy costume plays a banjo. Two men wear World War I uniforms. Two boys in matching suits and haircuts look at the camera uneasily. Two men — one appears intoxicated — hold liquor bottles.
Another gallery shows “comic foregrounds,” souvenir photos of people behind stand-ups that depict them as cops, jailbirds, bathing beauties, plane pilots, donkey cart drivers, a ventriloquist and his dummy and other foolish scenarios. “Comic foregrounds” were invented by Cassius Coolidge, better known for his kitsch-classic paintings of dogs playing poker.
Steiner enhanced the exhibit with cosmos-related pop-culture items that may have stoked the paper-moon trend: moony sheet music, articles about the 1910 coming of Halley’s comet, the 1902 movie “A Trip to the Moon.” One gallery has its own large-scale paper moon photo bay and a collection of hats, feather boas and jewelry, so visitors can leave with their own paper moon photo.
IT’S ONLY A PAPER MOON: SOUVENIR PHOTOGRAPHY IN AMERICA, 1870-1950 will be at Lyman Allyn Art Museum until May 14. lymanallyn.org.
