Dated Images

Young girl with her baby brother

From the very early years of photography into the 1950s, a small percentage of photographers made their living going around the country offering to photograph people in their homes. In effect, that translated to in front of their home, where the light was better. Sometimes they brought props that enticed parents to have their children photographed — on a pony, in a goat cart, etc.

In this photograph, the photographers apparently have a studio (at 820 Westminster street, Providence, Rhode Island), but they bill themselves right on their imprint as Prezeau & Tougas, home photographers. Conveniently for us, they also include the year in their imprint, 1903 in this case.

This images shows a little girl of seven or eight years, seated in a rocking chair, holding a baby in a very long christening gown — probably her little brother. It is interesting to note that even at her young age, the girl wears the high stiff collar that was currently in fashion for ladies of that time. Her dress has a fashionable yoke and embroidered trim.

The photographer draped a plain piece of canvas for background, and placed her chair next to a sparse and uninteresting potted plant. The white gown is washed out entirely in this too-contrasty image. If this is as good as they could do, I doubt these photographers stayed in business for long.

Crown Bank Port Dover Ontario 1906

Today’s dated image is a 1906 postcard, which serves to illustrate several interesting points about dating, copyright, photographs and postcards. The image side shows three gentlemen standing around the door of small building with a large sign on it — The Crown Bank of Canada. The picture is natural in tone and appearance for a black and white photograph — but it is not a photograph, it is a mechanical print.

If this picture were of much higher resolution, or if you had the original and looked at with a magnifying glass, you could probably see small dots make up the image (i.e. it is half-toned). There are other mechanical print methods used on postcards that do not have that feature though, such as woodburytypes. Perhaps we will find one of those for a future example. Mechanical prints are often made from real photographs, so they are reproductions of photographs, but they are not printed by photographic means, so they are not photographs.

Other postcards are real photographs — like our 1914 photo of the Thays family. Dealers and collectors refer to those as RPPCs – Real Photo Post Cards. Many eBay sellers don’t know the difference between the two, but use the term anyhow.

Our print has Pt Dover (for Port Dover) written on the face. There are two postmarks, one over the Canadian stamp with the beginning of a town name ‘Sim’ visible, and ‘No’ from the month, and at bottom another, clearer mark showing Grand Rapids, Mich, and Nov 1906. The card is addressed to Mr C M Hembling of Grand Rapids. It didn’t take much detective work to find Port Dover Ontario on Lake Erie, just a few miles from the larger town of Simcoe Ontario. We often see stamp boxes from those years with instructions to place a one-cent stamp for the US and Canada and two cents for Foreign. This shows that worked from either side of the border.

Since it predates the 1907 introduction of the divided-back, there is no message — just the recipients address. Many cards from that period included some blank area on the front for a short message, but in this case the image takes up the whole card.

We call this a 1906 photo, based on the postmark, but of course it could have been photographed any time prior to that. Since it was mailed in November, it may actually come from a photograph taken late-Spring or early-Summer (there are leaves on the trees) in 1906 and printed later that summer. Or it could be from a year or two earlier. The styles of the gent’s clothing suggest it was not much earlier. The building looks new, so local research might further limit the possible date range.

Because this is a mechanical print, we know it was ‘published’ and hence is in the public domain. It was probably printed as a free give-away by the bank. The situation is not always so clear with real-photo postcards. Many real-photo cards were produced in small quantities, not for sale, but for the use of some individual or family. If they were not made available to the public, they are unpublished, and their copyright extends for much longer. All images published prior to 1923 are in the public domain. In fact most postcards published 1923 to 1962 are also public domain because their original copyright was not renewed. But unpublished images are protected by copyright until 70 years after the photographer’s death, or for 120 years if the photographer was anonymous. See my discussion on the ClassyArts site for more info on copyrights.

Napoleon 'Larry' Lajoie in wheelchair 1905

This photograph is of baseball player Napoleon “Larry” Lajoie, an American of French-Canadian descent, and one of the games all-time great hitters. After winning three consecutive batting titles in 1902, 1903 and 1904, Larry (also called Nap) Lajoie was side-lined when an untreated spike injury became infected. After recovering he found a new challenger for the batting crown — Ty Cobb — and the two had an ongoing rivalry for the next ten years. This photo was taken in July of 1905 as he recovered from that leg infection.

The photographer was Louis Van Oeyen, who was a staff photographer for the Newspaper Enterprise Association at the time. Van Oeyen also worked for the Cleveland Press, and is considered a pioneer of sports photography. His collection of nearly 3,000 negatives and and equal number of historic photographs has been preserved, and can be found at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Most of the images are from the 1920s and 1930s, but the collections spans from 1890 to 1945. Van Oeyen was official photographer for the American League from 1908 to 1922. Louis Van Oeyen was born 17 January 1865 in Dayton Ohio, and died 12 December 1946 in Cleveland.

1901 Wedding Party Cyanotype

Here is a wedding party photo, dated on the back December 1901. This kind of image is called a cyanotype, and was popular in the 1890s through the 1920s, though the process was invented way back in 1842 and made public in 1849. It is the same process as architects used for ‘blueprints’ before the computerized cad-cam systems replaced hand drawn plans. The prints are most often blue, but they can be brownish or yellowish.

In this photo we see the wedding couple near the center, surrounded by their friends, as they stand in front of the layered wedding cake. They all sport the early 1900s style tall upright collar — an unusual congruence of male and female fashion — almost everyone was covering their necks with these abysmally uncomfortable stiff collars! Womens waistlines are high, with full sleeves but not absurdly so, as had been the fashion a few years earlier. Skirts are not so bulky as they had been in the 19th century, but still reach nearly to the floor — though that is not evident in this image. The men are all clean-shaven except the groom, who sports a long mustache.