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 people, the monogram seems just a tangle of lines. Often printed in fancy fonts that have been further modified by stretching and intertwining, they seem at a glance just a jumble. Indeed, in our digital archive, some of them are indecipherable — not because they lack a logic and clear character, but because you need to look very closely to see the details, and some of our dated images are reproduced too small to see such fine detail.
The hardest part about deciphering the monogram is sometimes deciding which order the letters should be in. Luckily, there are conventional systems that dictate how the monogram should be assembled, though they seem not to have been universally applied. Photographers are artists, and as such probably often designed their own monogram — perhaps some were unaware of the conventions, or chose to ignore them. Still, in the majority of cases, the exact sequence can be determined.