Great early photos
Here are some fabulous pictures from the dawn of photography.
I’ve seen a lot of old photos and daguerreotypes. In fact, I own a lot of old photos and daguerreotypes, many of ancestors whose names have been lot in the mists of time and probably will never be recovered. I’m not sure what to do with those; I’m loathe to throw them out but loathe to save them when I’m pretty sure they won’t mean a thing to those who come after me.
But the photos at the link are especially arresting. Unlike a lot of old photos where the subjects seem to have glazed, blank eyes from sitting around and posing statuelike for too long, quite a few of these people seem modern in their expressions. You get the idea they could walk off the computer screen and you could talk to them quite easily. The gulf does not seem very wide at all.
There’s also the first selfie:
I believe that the first photo ever was taken in 1826 ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Boulevard_du_Temple_by_Daguerre.jpg ). If you look very carefully at the gentleman getting his shoes polished in the lower left, it has a resemblace to Doctor Who. Or so it is alleged.
You might ask some of your family members if they would like them. If not, consider donating them to a local historical site, or to a genealogical society. Someone somewhere may know who they are and will bless your name for not destroying them.
they used to make special holders so that the person could sit for the few hours it took to take a picture… the first picture was actually on concrete..
anyway…. here is a similar oldie, but not a photo
[i could wait till doomsday trying to find a moment to share it… i dont have till doomsday]
Making socialists out of college students; a story of professors and other collegians who hobnob with radicals [1920]
https://archive.org/details/MakingSocialistsOutOfCollegeStudentsAStoryOfProfessorsAndOther
lots of old interesting stuff
but it will ALL be erased soon..
then we will forget the past, and things will be like feudal states where people believe that they are the fixed cog in a million year system that neer changes…
I bought a book on Kindle a while back titled “Don’t Tread on Me” with photographs and short biographies of men who fought in the American Revolution. It’s interesting to read about their experiences, mostly as enlisted men, and what life was like afterwards in the new United States.
Surellin: “If you look very carefully at the gentleman getting his shoes polished in the lower left, it has a resemblance to Doctor Who.”
Yes, and that large white spot in the bottom center is from when the Tardis arrived and left during the film being exposed.
Lucky for us, there are no known Daleks in the photo.
THE ONGOING MOMENT by Geoff Dyer is the best book I’ve read about the history of photography. Sometimes Dyer can seem too hip for his own good, but not here. This made me very interested in many great photographers I’d never of before; I could easily have spent hundreds of dollars seeking books on the wor of people I saw for the first time because of Dyer.
Actually there is one even older than the street scene, of rooftops only, circa 1826:
http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/wallpaper/photography/photos/milestones-photography/niepce-first-photo/
Neo, you were already on my short list of blogs to read, but this sort of thing, coming the same day that I go to a Civil War museum with tons of these kinds of things in its (private) collection, excites me. Thanks.
I don’t know, maybe this is widely known, but I’ll mention it anyway. The Library of Congress has a large collection of photographs. Many of them have been scanned, and can be seen at the Library’s web site.
You can search or browse a single collection — e.g. “daguerreotypes” — or you can search all the collections at once. The Library can make reproductions, but I’ve forgotten what they charge, and some photos have copyright restrictions.
Here’s a link to the daguerreotype collection http://tinyurl.com/pbkq28l
Thanks for bringing these old photographs to our attention.
I have always found the early 3 plate color photographs from Czarist Russia to be among the most interesting.
I can’t find any photographs of Abraham and Mary Lincoln together. I did find one that purports to be taken on their wedding day but that appears to be fake because I found the individual photos that were flipped and clumsily combined.
Another thing that has struck me is how rumpled, unkempt, unhealthy, and even near lunatic large numbers of people look in early photos; even those military men posing for official photographs in the 1850’s and 60’s.
Not all of course. For every three or four Benjamin Butlers or David Hunters, there are one or two Robert E. Lees or US Grants.
Then, in contrast, look at those cityscapes and street scenes of bourgeois America from the 1890’s through the 1920’s.
What surprised me most was how people in the post Victorian, early decades of the 20th century, presented themselves when they went out in public. Didn’t seem to matter what economic class they might have been.
Well, try to look.
I had in mind to link to the folder from which this linked image https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Michigan_%26_Griswold_circa_1920.jpg originally came.
However, the original U of M link informs us that the collection of those amazing [large format] images has been “retired” and turned over to the Detroit Public library; which provides neither the format nor the indexing. Glad I downloaded them while I had the chance a few years back.
Now, I guess there are plenty of historic photos from the Bowery, or Five points where folks are slouching, shabby, and sullen, but that did not seem to be the demeanor of most Americans casually going about their business during the era I saw captured.
Makes you wonder if our view of life isn’t just a bit jaundiced by what we are daily bombarded with (being a little facetious here).
So Bruce Campbell took the first selfie. Sounds about right.
Hmm.
FIFY, charles.
Look in the building in the center of the photo, at the third window down in the center of the building.
I’m pretty sure that is, indeed, a Dalek, peering through the glass.
We had thousands upon thousands of old family photos and slides. We took the decision to digitize them, load them into the cloud and onto DVDs and toss the hard copy into the dumpster. For photos, I used a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M scanner. It is fast and delivers good resolution. It also deals with warped photos and photos that are much thicker than paper. For slides and negatives, I used a DSLR, a macro lens, a remote flash and a light box. That is much more complicated than using the scanner, but I got good results.
The scanner is really designed for documents. I scanned 27,000 pages from my wife’s research folders – mostly photocopies of journal articles – and saved them as PDF files. I then OCR’d them using Abbey Fine Reader so all the text in those PDF files became recognizable as text. So now she can use Agent Ransack (wonderful free program) to search all her research notes for any key words she wants in a few seconds. All her research folders, created over 20 years, went into the dumpster. That freed up a complete bookcase.
Google and Amazon both offer amazing cloud storage options. Google lets you store an unlimited number of photographs in the cloud, provided they are less the 2048 pixels wide. Even better, you can search your photos by person, landmark, or object. If I want to see every photo I took of my wife, I just have to click her image and they all come up. If I type in “rainbow”, I see all my photos of rainbows.
Amazon allows unlimited photo storage and 5gb(?) of data storage for Prime members. I blew their data storage limit so I pay a bit extra for that.
Digitize and toss, or sell on eBay if the originals have potential value.