A champion chinchilla Persian rests near a stack of books “like a lordly little lion” in Bloomsberg, Pennsylvania.
Vintage Photos of Pampered Cats
Published in 1938 in National Geographic magazine, these images were also groundbreaking for their use of synchronized photoflash.
Long before cats took over the internet—and long before there was an internet to conquer—photographer Willard Culver spent months in the sitting rooms of America’s well-to-do, capturing elaborate staged photos of some very pampered pussycats.
The series of photos appeared in the November 1938 issue ofNational Geographic magazine, accompanying an essay by Frederick Eddy, the former president of the Siamese Cat Society of America and the Empire Cat Club of New York. (Read surprising things you never knew about your cat.)
For Culver, the series was as much about groundbreaking photography as capturing timeless images of cats. He took his color prints with a synchronized photoflash and the feline photo series was the first time such photos were ever published.
“Culver
