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This is a very rare CDV taken outside the studio. Photography was still complicated which meant tht a lot of work wa involved in going outude the studio. Narly all prsonal CDVs were taken in the studio. This is important bcause it suggests something about the family involved. It would have been expensive to pay a photographer to move his equipment outside the studio. Which means the family was probably well-to- do. In this case we also get to see the family's brick home in the background. The family consists of the older daughters probably teenagers and a younger brother about 6 years olds. We get to see the girl's long voluminous dresses. The boy wears a button-on blouse which we think knicker pants. We see knicker pants in the 1860s, by in the 70s, straight-leg knee pantsbegan to become standard. The portrait is undated, but the card mount sugests the late-1860s, just after the Civil War. A reader aises the possiblity of there being a the work of a traveling photographr. That certainly is apossibility, but if that was the case and traveling photographers were a commercial possiblity, we would see a lot of these outside the studio portrits. And the fact is that we see almost noe until the 1890s and not all that mnany then. The commercial development of the industry was to set up studios and clients wold come to you. And we see photograohiv studios in just about every twn in America. As long as a town had some 2,000 residents, there probably was a phoogrphic studio. This meant that there wereveryfew Ameicans tha did mot live near a town with a photograohic studio. Most mericans lived in rural areas in the 9th century. But vey fewwesoisolted that hey didnn't cme in twn ar least once every monh or so. And it would hve been a lot cheaper to have a portrait taken when you wwre in town than what a travlng photograoher would have had to charge given the very few clinets that could be photogrphed in a day. The equipment required a horse and waggon traveling st very slow speeds over unimproved roads. There were traveling phographers in the 19th centuyry, but the ones we are fmilr with were tking images that they could sell rather than personl portrits. There was a market for interestign imges because of the popuarity of stereoscopes.
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