Real Photo Postcard Portraits
Real photo postcards were used for portraits as well as scenery. In this report, we will focus just on the portraits, as that seems to have been the most popular use for real photo postcards when they were first introduced at the beginning of the 20th century.
We will further limit this study to non-celebrity portraits by jumping to the somewhat unwarranted assumption that celebrity photos will have the name of the subject printed on the face of the card. In fact, that is not always true, but the exceptions are few enough that we can disregard their impact on our analysis.
It is well known that real-photo postcards were introduced around 1900, and are still produced today. Our interest in this report is to examine the percentage of dated photographs that are real-photo portraits, to see when the ‘fad’ peaked in popularity.
Preponderance of Evidence
In this post we are going to digress a bit from our usual technique of examining a single element found in photographs, and describing its frequency and temporal distribution, to discuss briefly our methodology. To fully understand the relevance of our observations, you need to understand how we arrived at the conclusions we draw from the available data.
The first question then, is: What is the ‘available data?’ We draw on three collections of dated images, using them individually or in combination depending on the nature of the question at hand. Each of them has its own limitations and characteristics that make it suitable for answering some questions, but not others. The primary qualification here is that they all are ‘dated’ images — but how do we know those dates are accurate? We will address that question in detail later in this post, first let’s look at the data sources.
One excellent source that we frequently use is the book Dressed for the Photographer, Ordinary Americans & Fashion, 1840-1900, by Joan Severa. Ms Severa is an expert in antique fashions, and applies her knowledge to some 280 photographs, beautifully reproduced. She describes the styles of each decade with about 25 pages of text, then goes on to show and discuss in detail actual photos from that decade. The book includes a useful 25 page glossary as well. In all over 600 big 8 x 11 inch pages make this hefty tome a gold-mine for those interested in antique photography.
Observing Preservers
Preservers. Not exactly Life Preservers, but in a sense serving the same purpose. In case mounted images, such as daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and early tintypes, the preserver was a thin brass (or more specifically, ‘pinchbeck’) element, folded around the edges of the image, cover-mat, and glass cover.
How would such a contrivance ‘preserve’ the image? Well, when removing the three components (or, rarely, two) from the case, the preserver holds the three together, so they do not slide about and scratch the image.
The preserver would also help hold the image more securely in the case, I suppose. It might help further restrict the flow of air over the surface of the image as well, slowing the chemical degradation such as tarnishing, that is dependant on oxygen — but it was far from being a hermitic seal.
Those who have studied daguerreotype cases cite the absence of preserver as an indication of early provenience, specifically 1839-49 (of photographic images, only daguerreotypes were placed in cases in those years). After that, preservers were supposed to be ’simpler’ in design 1850-55, and more ornate after 1855. Most ambrotypes and early tintypes date from 1855 or later, so they usually have the more ornate preservers. Nobody defines exactly how to distinguish ’simple’ from ‘ornate’ — so in this study we distinguish four levels of complexity, describe and define each, and look at the temporal distributions for each.
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 we refer to the workers as photographers, but in the days of the daguerreotype they were daguerreians, daguerreotypists, operators and artists. Later there were some who called themselves photographists.
The place of business is today mostly referred to as photographic studio, but that term was relatively late to arrive on the scene. Daguerrians were artists, so they had galleries to display their work. Itinerants took ‘rooms’ to do their work, when they weren’t operating out of a tent or wagon. Later they might have a ‘Photographic Art Palace’ or even a ‘Premium Sunbeam Gallery’ — but most settled for ‘Photographic Gallery’.
The Golden Line
In this report we are going to look at the occurrence and frequency of a broad gilt line on the front of card-mounted photographs, particularly CDVs, but occasionally also on cabinet cards.
The use of ‘gilt’ or gold-coloring on cards was not uncommon, and you should not confuse some of the other uses, particularly gilt-edges, with the golden line we refer to here. Some cards have a beveled edge (cut at an angle so it is visible from the front), and when those edges are gilt they give an appearance similar to the golden line we are talking about.
The main characteristics of the golden line are that it is wide - typically .08 inch (2 mm) on a CDV, and a bit wider on cabinet cards, .1 to .15 inch (2.5 to 3.8 mm), and it is on the flat front surface of the card, at the very outer edge (see the first illustration).
The Inverted V Tie
A glance at our first illustration will show why I chose to call this style of tie ‘Inverted V’. This gentleman’s perfectly trimmed mustache echoes exactly the form of the tie, a shape mirrored by the sharp downward points of his collar. This also happens to be the earliest example we have of this style of tie, from May of 1873.
Another example, our second image, taken in 1876, shows that the V is not always so sharp as it was for the first gentleman, because the knot used is square, so it truncated the upper part of the inverted V shape.
Characteristics of the inverted V tie are a sqare knot, and a folded-down collar, with the ends of the tie tucked under the collar and vest, so that only a thin stripe is visible, along the edges of the collar points.
Introduction
Welcome to When Was That? the blog that asks … duh … When was that? This site is about dating photographs — no, not dinner and a movie type dates, I mean the year. Sometimes the month. Sometimes even the day.
Our prime focus is:
- U.S.A. and Canada
- 1839-1949
- Photographic Images, even when printed by photomechanical or other methods
- Minutia, Styles, Fads and other clues
There are an amazing number of clues to the date of a photograph, most of which go totally unnoticed by the average viewer. Read this site for a while and you will look differently and see more.