When I’m not riding a Lambretta, I’m either at home with the wife and kids, (usually doing homework), or at work being a graphic designer. One of the design blogs I visit, Design You Can Trust, recently featured some wonderful photography by an american photojouranlist Ruth Orkin. 

A lot of her most arresting images come from the ’50s and ’60s, and there’s a lot of New York scenes, celebraties and musicians. Fabulous stuff, if you’re interested there’s a great online archive here. The image that caught my eye though was “American girl in Italy”, initially because of the rather cool couple of gents, astride a Model D. I thought, what a great image… how cool are all the guys in the image, so well dressed… and then you see the girls face. She’s obviously not happy with all the attention she’s getting. Looks pretty scared in fact. Maybe the good old days weren’t quite as rosy as we like to think of them.

EDIT/UPDATE: I’ve just found out that this is an iconic image, that nearly everybody in the world had seen! It’s even referenced on the Lambretta Wikipedia page. Oh well!

I do love old pics of scooters though, even better when the scooters are quite incedental to the image. If you’ve got any old Lambretta shots, I’d love to see them.