Snapshot Notes Part 2
1920-1959
In this second part of the discussion on snapshot photos we will look at snapshots from the 1920s through 1950s. Through this entire period, almost all snapshot prints we see are black and white. Natural colored slides were produced during this period, but were nowhere near as popular as black and white prints for the common snapshot. Instant snapshot colored prints were introduced just after our period of interest, when Polaroid came out with Polacolor in the mid-1960s. Other processes to produce colored prints were too expensive to be widely used for snapshots.
For our current purposes, we will focus on prints here, and leave the slides for another article. Throughout this period, prints were produced on heavy enough paper that they did not need to be mounted, though the practice of pasting them into old photo albums continued. Photo albums from this period typically had paper pages, but came with small ‘corners’ that could be pasted to the page at the correct positions so that the photo was held in place at the corners without putting glue on the print itself.
In the 1920s we find prints both with and without blank white borders. The width of those borders, when present, is highly variable. Most snapshot prints were postcard sized or slightly smaller, and they were almost always rectangular, with the short dimension roughly 60% as wide as the longer dimension. Beginning about 1925 snapshots often have a printed border within the white border around the edge. The following illustration has some typical printed borders from 1925 through the mid-1940s.