Figure 1.--Here we have a cabinet card portrait taken in New York City. The mount style, especially the color, and the fashions suggest the portrait was taken about 1905. It could have been a family snapshot printed by a studio. But we suspect that it was taken by a photographer going door to door, something we do not see commonly. The boy wears a ratherwhethered peaked cap, double-breasted jacket, knee pants, long stockimgs, and high-top shoes. The girls wears an elaborately decorated hat and plain white dress and like her brother long stockings anf high-top shoes. This suggests that the children were not from a very affuent family. We suspect the building in the vackground is a tenament. The infornmation on the back suggests that it was not an establighed studio because it inly says "Photographer", although there may be an address.

Major changes took place in photography during 1900. The major shift resulted from the Kodak Brownie which was released in 1900. The simple to operate Brownie was an instant success. As a result, for the first time in the history of photography, we see large numbers of snapshots. This greatly increased the number of available images compared to earlier decades. It also changes the character and nature of the images. We seen unposed images around the home and in other locations like parks rather than just stiff, formal studio portraits. There are also many studio portraits. The portraits, however, are quite different. The cabinet cards become much less common. We see portraits with large paper frames surrounding sometimes small portraits. The frames were often embossed. Grey or green card stock was commonly used. There were still quite a number of cabinet cards in the early 1900s, but very rapidly declined in popularity, although the format persisted longer in Europe. The 1900s portraits HBC has have found are both snapshots and formal portraits. We note an unusual phenomenon, almost unique to the 1900s decade. That is what look to be professionally posed portraits taken outside the studio. We wonder if studios did not send photographers door to take portraits. Or perhaps photographer worked on their own going door to door. The Kodak Brownie brought down the cost of photography, by mos working-class Americans still could not afford a camera and the expenses associated with family snapshots. We also begin to see photographs with postcard backs, a format that would continue into the 1930s. We see both studio portraits and snapshots done with postcard backs, although only some were mailed as postcards.

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Created: 5:36 AM 8/10/2024
Last updated: 5:36 AM 8/10/2024