Archive for the '1890s' Category
Photos With Square Mounts
Somehow, about the year 1890, photographers got the strange idea that images might look good mounted on square card-mounts. Card mounts came in various sizes, but they had always been rectangular. Esthetically it was a lousy idea, but for a while in the 1890s and early 1900s there was a fad for square card mounts.
Here […]
Read More..>>Single Border Line
If you read these posts regularly, you will remember that in an earlier post on the double line border I stated that:
We are restricting our research to the double line because a single line continued to be used sporadically for as long as CDVs and Cabinet Cards were produced.
Well now I will have to eat […]
Glossy Dark Card Fronts
Chocolate Brown, Dark Green and Black
The cards we describe in this article have dark card faces, typically a dark chocolate brown, or very dark green, or even black. There were cards with black fronts both before and after the period we describe, but they tended to be mat-surfaced, like regular writing paper. The cards we […]
Lengthwise Imprints
On card mounted photographs, we see the photographer’s imprint on front, on back, or both. When the imprint is on the back, it can be oriented the way most portraits are, with the ‘upright’ dimension the longer one, or it can be oriented parallel to the long side, like a typical business card. It is […]
Read More..>>Snapshot Notes Part 1
1888-1919
The snapshot was born with the hand-held camera, the most popular being the Kodak, introduced in 1888. In this article we are going to explore the first 32 years of snapshots, and look at how their appearance gives clues to their age. In subsequent articles we will look at some of the later developments in […]
The Dividing Line
The dividing line is a thick, decorative line across the front of a cabinet card that divides the space in two, the large upper part for the image, and a small lower section for the photographer’s imprint. I first noticed this style of imprint on a card by a railroad photographer, and the line resembled […]
Read More..>>Notched Sides
Notches along the sides of card mounted photographs are mostly a characteristic of Cabinet Cards, though a few CDVs, some of the late square and nearly square formats also have notches. Compared to cards of the same age in general, the notched cards seem to have square corners more frequently, though notched cards with rounded […]
Read More..>>Monograms
Monograms, those funny logos made up of intertwined letters — have you ever looked closely at them? Most people ignore these clues, they seem too commonplace to bear special attention. To the alert researcher, however, they can provide not only a clue as to who took the photograph, but also when it was taken.
To many […]
Studying Studio
Lets look at the words on the back of CDVs with photographer’s imprints. You probably never paid much attention to the various terms they used to describe their business, they mostly seem very common terms. But when photography was young, there was not yet a consensus on what to call the workers or the workplace.
Today […]