Five Smiling Women in Lansing Iowa 1891
It was the beginning of the ‘Gay 90s’ and people were beginning to relax slightly from the Victorian stiffness that had so long prevailed. Photographers were becoming more experimental in their posing, trying to effect natural-seeming settings in the studio.
Here we have five young women arranged as if outdoors for a bit of bird-watching (two hold small opera-glasses/binoculars) and one has a large box camera on her lap. A small mound of dried plants in the foreground help us imagine that the painted background really is a forest. Every one of the women is smiling.
I like group photos, not just for their dynamics, but because they let us see some of the diversity of styles that were clearly contemporaneous. The various hats and dress styles in this example show some of the range of decoration that was available for individual expression, without forgoing the basic puffy upper-sleeve and small collars that define the early 90s style.
This photo was taken by J R McGarrity of Lansing Iowa (we deduced the initials from the monogram). That would probably be John R McGarrity, who was married to Emma J Schrody. His photographic career was probably short-lived, he was born about 1861 in Iowa, so he probably took up photography in the 1880s some time. By 1900 his wife was living with her parents, and he was off somewhere, probably looking for work to support his wife and two young children. By 1910 he is back in the county, working as a newspaper printer.
