Sticking your face in a cutout and taking a picture is a staple at carnivals, birthdays or other events. The classics are the muscle man or a woman in a bathing suit, but nowadays you can find almost any type of cutout.
What's interesting is that these pieces of cardboard or wood have a much more sophisticated name. "Comic foregrounds" is the official term, bestowed upon the pieces by their original creator Cassius "Cash" Coolidge.
If you've ever seen the famous Dogs Playing Poker paintings, you've probably heard of Coolidge. He was a self-taught artist who also painted cartoons and taught penmanship. His paintings depicting dogs in human situations are best-known today, and he is most likely the inventor of that motif.
But let's come back to the comic foregrounds. He received a patent for "Processes of Taking Photographic Pictures" on April 14, 1974. The patent reads: "The nature of my invention consists in a process of taking a photograph or other picture of a person's head large on a miniature body."
Joel Lewis describes Coolidge's invention as "carnival cutouts." "The device was a painted wooden facade featuring a colorful character in an outlandish situation with a hole where the head should be." A person could stick their head into the hole and a photographer would capture the image for posterity.
The most popular iterations of the genre were "a weightlifting hunk," a "bathing beauty," a "swimmer perilously clenched in the mouth of a shark" or a "fat man in a bathing suit." Yet Coolidge penned over 200 drawings of possible characters for beachgoers to get photographed as.
In many of the drawings, Coolidge used images of animals. There's a human head with the body of a monkey among his sketches. Human heads disassociated from the human body seemed to interest Coolidge in general. There are many sketches depicting severed heads; in one of them, a head is even served on a platter.
In many of Coolidge's other sketches, the characters are simply vignettes of simple everyday life. Jordan Beer and Albert Narah suggest that it wasn't the imaginative setting that attracted customers. "It was the possibility of memorializing the act of being represented itself – of recording one’s own re-creation as an image," they write.
#19 This Is One Of Those Cardboard Character Cutouts With A Hole In Them, So That Kids Can Stick Their Heads In It And Be The Character. In This Case, You Can Be The Bird's Eye
#20 Redcar, One Place We Will Never Go Again. What Are The Other Two Holes For, By The Way?
