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“Un Coup de Pompe, S.V.P.” by Unknown, French, 1899. Around the turn of the twentieth century, decapitation was a hugely popular theme among photographers, stage magicians, and early filmmakers such as Georges Méliès. This photograph of a bearded gentleman tenderly inflating an enlarged duplicate of his own head with a bicycle pump graced the cover of the amateur photography magazine Photo Pêle-Mêle in 1903. Apparently, balloon heads were in the air in Belle Époque Paris. Two years earlier, Méliès had produced a short film, L’homme à la tête de caoutchouc (The Man with the Rubber Head, 1901), in which a scientist inflates a replica of his own head with a bellows. (Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
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