Hilarious Photographs Depict Five Stages of Inebriation


This funny series of old photographs features the slow transformation from sobriety to complete intoxication. Created by photographer Charles Percy Pickering, Five Stages of Inebriation is a hilarious way of showing how alcohol affects physical coordination. Across the five pictures, an upright, dignified gentleman slowly deteriorates into a sloppy drunk in a wheelbarrow.

The tiny prints, only a little larger than 2×3.5 inches, are mounted on a thicker paper card in the high-brow, trending style of carte-de-viste, or visiting cards. Roughly dated between 1863-1868, it is believed that each shot is a posed, studio portraits that was put together for educational purposes.

The New South Wales State Library website explains, “Possibly commissioned by a local temperance group for educative purposes, the photographs may also have been used by an engraver for illustrations. The penultimate frame of the drunk in a wheelbarrow resembles S.T. Gill’s watercolour ‘Ease without Opulence’, 1863.”





State Library of New South Wales
via [Juxtapoz]

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