Dated Images

Naiche, Chief of the Chiricahua Apache 1898

This is a photograph of Naiche (ca 1856 – 1919), son of Chochise, in his U.S. Military uniform, wearing medals he was awarded. The crossed arrows with letters USS on his hat were part of the Indian Scout uniform from 1890 until 1907.

This photo was taken in 1898 by Adolph F Muhr (ca 1858 – 1913) and published by F A Rinehart. Muhr took up photography in the late 1870s in Hoboken New Jersey, and moved to Denver in the early 1880s. He married Cora about 1885, and they moved to Omaha, perhaps about 1898, to work with Frank Rinehart (see below). Sometime between 1900 and 1910 Adolph and Cora moved to Seattle, Washington.

Frank A Rinehart (1861-1928) was an artist and photographer, well known for his Native American portraits. He operated out of Denver ca 1879-1881, then joined the staff of William Henry Jackson there. In 1885 he married the receptionist at the Jackson studio – Anna Ransom Johnson, and they moved to Omaha Nebraska, where Rinehart opened his own studio, remaining there until his death in 1928.

In 1898 Rinehart was commissioned to photograph the Native Americans attending the Indian Congress held in conjunction with the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha. Rinehart hired Adolph Muhr as his assistant.

Horace Mann School in the Bronx 1934

Class photos are great for viewing the range clothing styles popular for a particular age group. They are often dated right on the image, which makes things easy. This one does not include the name of the photographer however.

Here we have students dressed in their winter coats, standing on the school steps. These are upper middle class kids, since it is a private college prep school which poorer families would not have been able to afford — there wasn’t much in the way of financial aid available in those days, and this was taken during the Great Depression.

One kid in back is wearing a leather aviator’s cap, and several have leather jackets. Double breasted coats seem to have been the most popular style for both boys and girls, and a couple of the girls have large fur collars. Twenty of the twenty-two students wear hats of some sort. The boys wear knickerbockers.

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.

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.