Typewriters

March 19, 2025

Typewriters live in that period of history when the world was captured in black and white film. For me, this block of time exists from roughly 1850 until 1950. I know that the camera obscura was invented well before this date and colour film also preceded what I see as the end of the black and white world but when I think of these years, they are always in black and white. And it’s everything. Clothes are black and white. Homes are painted in various shades of grey. Animals only had black, white or grey fur. Even food was grey. A red apple in 1905 doesn’t seem right. Surely they were grey too. I know that it’s absurd. Of course all of those things existed in colour. In paintings from those years, the colour seems right. And maybe that’s why the world before 1850 is a colourful world in my mind. Most representations before that were colour paintings. So it makes sense that the world was a colourful world. But not for the 100 years after that. Those live in my mind as the black and white years.

So when I started taking these photos of my Underwood typewriter in colour it felt a bit jarring. The typewriter itself is black and white but the wooden table is brown. That warm brown stuck out in a bad way and I only took one or two before I switched to black and white. And now this typewriter from 1930 or 1940 (I’m just guessing) is at home in a black and white world.