English Village 1890

This is one of two enormous contact prints from glass plate negatives that were labeled Evesham, a town in the Cotswolds vale on the River Avon, but I am not ready to declare that after looking at Google Earth views of Evesham today, there are too many discrepancies and too many English towns and villages – I may never know unless someone recognizes it.

The camera that took this lovely view is not in the category of, "I'm going out; should I take my camera?"; the large view camera was the reason for going out! The river runs through this lush scene that has gardens and greenhouses in the foreground, substantial houses, streets, a church, and hills beyond. The only signs in sight are Holmes & Ash Implement Depot, J. Barrett, Draper, a toy shop and W. Hudson Castle and Commercial Hotel. The haze over the town is largely due to smoke from the many chimneys; coal would have been the fuel for heating and cooking. I do not see a single person or vehicle in this view; at some later date I will post the amazingly different second view which is full of both.

I never look at photos from the past without thinking of how many things we will never see because the camera had not been invented, and so much we only see now because someone made the effort to record it before it was gone, never realizing that it would disappear.

The Ruins

If unanswered questions bother you, photo collecting is not for you. Most antique photos are unsolved mysteries in monochrome.

How many photos have you taken that are identified? You know what they are because you took them for your own reasons, but if you don't write a subject or date on the back (use pencil; I have repaired enough ink stains from the faces of photos to last me the rest of my life, and I plan for it to be a long one) you are creating a problem for someone else when you no longer remember or aren't around to answer questions. That is not a crime on the books as far as I know, but it is a surefire recipe for frustration.

In the last 20 years I have photographed most of the foremost cathedrals, abbeys and castles in England, Scotland and Ireland (yeah, I know, my travels are boring affairs), but this ruined church isn't ringing any visual bells (and I have a pretty reliable camera in my brain) or it is not in the venerable isles at all.

If this large cabinet print is contemporary with the carriage then it might be at least 150 years old, but there is no way to be certain. The figure, who moved slightly during the exposure, wears a white hat that we often connect with the european colonial period. The only thing we can say with any confidence is that it was likely taken by a tourist as a souvenir of travels. That is about it.

Steam Pumper Fire Engine 1900

If you are startled to see a vivid blue photograph on Timebinder, it is a cyanotype, one of the least pleasing or successful of the early print processes – not my cup of tea either.

Sir John Herschel discovered the formula in 1842: equal parts of Potassium ferricyanide and Ferric ammonium citrate are dissolved in water, the paper is saturated in it and dried in the dark; when exposed in sunlight (or any ultraviolet source) through a photographic negative (or plants, flowers or anything that light will penetrate) the Prussian blue dye is evident when the paper is washed with water. Because it is a chemical salt that is "in" the paper itself instead of silver or platinum salts that are in an emulsion "on" paper, the results are rather coarse and incapable of revealing the tonal range of the black and white images we are accustomed to seeing. Below is the same image converted to grayscale which is easier to look at (perhaps because we are accustomed to it), but it still does not have much dynamic range.

Having dispensed with the process, we can deal with the image itself. I do not know where it was taken or who manufactured it, but it is an early self-propelled 20th century model that is the heir to the horse drawn steam pumpers used as early as 1829 in England and well into the 1900s. Why did it take so many decades to decide to use the power from the steam to drive the vehicle as well as the pumps, after all, the invention of steam engines had always been for pushing, pulling, pumping, sawing and motive power? The self-propelled fire engine steamer wasn't around very long because the internal combustion engine was soon capable of greater power, was easier to maintain and inherently safer to operate (any steam engine in the wrong hands was patently lethal; it's dangerous enough fighting fires without worrying about being blown up!) The Stanley Steamer automobile couldn't compete with the gasoline engine either.

Not Alice

Everything about this tiny, early Carte de Visite places it around 1860, so she would have been a contemporary of Alice Liddell, the assumed inspiration for Lewis Carroll's (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) Alice in Wonderland. Dodgson was an accomplished amateur photographer whose photos of his acquaintances' daughters were very different in mood and setting from this sweet studio image. 

The photographer was T. H. Larmouth of High Street, Tunbridge Wells, England, who established his studio in 1851 and advertised that duplicates "may always be had 1 shilling each." Note that early photos used plain backgrounds with hangings and furniture instead of the fanciful painted backdrops and faux props that became popular later in Victorian studio work. I have cropped this one at top and bottom; photographers used standard negatives and cards so that accommodating the subject width often led to considerable areas above and below the person being photographed (today we would get closer to the person and include partial views of anything else).

A Solemn Moment

This young girl posing in the yard with her dolls is a small home photo pasted to a course deckled card, perhaps purchased from the developing service (it is not one of the nicer studio mounts.)

She has an earnest but solemn expression on her lightly freckled face, maybe because she was a naturally serious child or maybe because having this record of her dolls was so important to her. Her own dress is modest and either new or freshly pressed for this event, her tall shoes are not laced to the top, but her dolls are quite nice with real hair, well-painted features and set-in glass eyes (but not the weighted ones that close); the one in her lap has an elaborate dress and knitted socks, but no shoes. There is a small stuffed dog next to the chair leg.

The enameled photo paper may place this as late 19th century.