Hanging up the wash. Harry Whittier Frees 1914, via LOC
One lesson the Internet teaches over and over is that the world is hard, cruel, unjust, and full of sexism, racism and sadism. In fact, there's only one thing online that doesn’t divide people into lunatics spewing Nazi comparisons: cute animals doing people things.
"Making a date" Harry Whittier Frees, 1914, via LOC.
Hence the beauty of the Library of Congress’s big collection of Harry Whittier Frees photographs. Even if your tax dollars are being spent to pay people to spy on you—and extrajudicial killings, dubious imprisonment, and shitty juries—at least a tiny fraction of a percentage of that money goes to ensuring that these images are persevered for posterity.
Fire! Harry Whittier Frees, 1914, via LOC
Frees was born in 1879 in Pennsylvania, where he lived for most of his life. While the power of a captioned pet picture had been proven by Harry Pointer in the 1870s, Frees put a party hat on his family cat and snapped a picture in 1906. It was the LOLcat equivalent of splitting the atom. That picture was such a success that Frees began dressing and posing puppies, rabbits, pigs in human situations, but he always held that the “kitten is the most versatile animal actor, and possesses the greatest variety of appeal.”
The fast express. Harry Whittier Frees, 1914, via LOC
So Frees went to work literally herding cats and dressing and posing them, for calendars, magazines and postcards. His work is a testament to his patience—cats then were as uninterested in posing as cats now—and to the timeless appeal of felines looking like people. While the dolls in his pictures have gotten more unnerving and creepy with age, the cats inspire ever more adoration. It was the prototype of the Internet catnip, how did he know?
Pumping, Harry Whittier Frees. 1914, via LOC.
Playtime, Harry Whittier Frees, 1914, via LOC.
If Roland Barthes were alive today, he would no doubt be writing blog posts about how the LOLcat—like Aesop, like folktales, like cave drawings—points back to some primordial myth, and that is part of their universal appeal. It's also possible that Roland Barthes would be struggling to pay his rent, working as an adjunct, a thought so depressing that I'm going to need some more Frees to get through my day.
Washing Dishes, Harry Whittier Frees, 1914, via LOC.
Cat wedding, anyone? Boom!
The Wedding. Harry Whittier Frees, 1914, via LOC.
The outing, Harry Whittier Frees, 1914 via LOC.
Watering the flowers. Harry Whittier Frees, 1914, via LOC.
And if you’re not satisfied with just Harry Whittier Frees’s work, the tag “animals human situations” is a deep Internet well of quick satisfaction. It’s probably NSFW; not because the pictures are ever vulgar, but because if you’re at work, you probably have better things to do.
Tommy Atkins, from 1905, via LOC.
Or maybe you don't.