I thought I’d do a recap of the images in my collection that show the posing stand to some degree or other.
 |
 Gullie & Lottie Tarkinton[/caption] |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
There’s more but I don’t have time to hunt through my media library to find them all.
The point of the exercise is to show examples where the head clamp stand is visible. It’s a highly distinctive mark of early period photography, from the Daguerrian era through the middle of the wet collodion era. I don’t know if it was just that photographers got better at hiding them, or if the emulsions got faster, but it seems like in the later days of collodion photography, you don’t see the head clamp stands. I don’t have a definitive date or date range for the end of the head clamp, but my guess would be by the 1880s. Wet collodion persisted into the 1920s as a medium, but by the 1880s you had the beginnings of silver gelatin dry plates that were at least as fast as wet plate, if not faster, so as dry plate takes over, naturally they would phase out.
dcphotoartist 
Beautiful! Loved Tom Thumb and Minnie Warren… I send you my blog of antique photographs of Latin America (Unlocking time: http://www.abrireltiempo.com )
Thanks for the link! Neat stuff on your site. Have you seen the CD Fredericks photos I have? I don’t know that any of them were taken in his Havana studio, but he did run studios in Havana, New York and Paris.
A while ago I saw a TV murder mystery set in Victorian times, and each of the murder victims had these puzzling bruises on the backs of their necks. The detective finally realized the victims were murdered while strapped into posing stands, which is how the detective determined that the killer was the photographer. 🙂