This is Burton Holmes (1870-1958):
He’s posing ‘As a gentleman of Japan dressed for rainy day promenade.’ It looks to me like he’s wearing wearing two kimonos, neither of which appears all that rain-proof.
And this is me posing on Hollywood Boulevard with various walkers behind me. The dinosaur you can see behind them is atop the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum.
There’s a little more connection between these two images than you might immediately think, chiefly that Burton Holmes has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which at this time of writing I do not, but there’s more to it than that.
Burton Holmes, who some people know, and many more don’t, was a great traveller in the days when being a great traveller was a ‘thing.’
I know him best as a photographer but he was considerably more than that. He delivered hugely successful public lectures about his travels, illustrated first with hand coloured slides and eventually with film that he’d shot. This put him way ahead of the game, before the slide show and the home movie became domesticated and ruined many a family evening. It’s also said, and I have no reason to doubt it, that Burton Holmes invented the term ‘travelogue.’
I’m not sure how much walking Holmes did. It was possibly limited by how much photographic gear he was carrying,
but certainly plenty of his photographs show people walking:
And this is me, posing not ‘as a gentleman of Japan’ but as an Englishman in a kimono, and not ‘dressed for rainy day promenade’ but for mooching about in a hotel room.
And here’s where it all comes together. Holmes owned, among other properties, a duplex apartment in New York which he named "Nirvana," an understated little bolthole as you can see:
He eventually sold the apartment to Robert Ripley (1890-1949) – he of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not cartoon strip and eventually a series of museums, which I understand are franchised, including the one on Hollywood Boulevard: see above. This is Ripley with the whole world in his hands:
And here he is posing, and very possibly walking, walking in China:
Much more about Burton Holmes here:
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