Another CDV by C.D. Fredricks, of Lavinia Warren Stratton, Mrs. Tom Thumb. It’s an interesting addition to the Tom Thumb collection, as it shows they (the Thumbs) were very much the same as 21st century celebrities, getting photographed by all the fashionable photographers and trying to capitalize on their fame while it lasted. They seem to have had a particular loyalty to Brady, as this is the first definitive non-Brady I own of them. Can’t wait to find more
Here is a previously undocumented photograph of Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. The second-most infamous prisoner-of-war camp in the Confederacy (after Andersonville), it housed Union officers and had an appallingly high mortality rate. For more information on the prison and its history, check: Libby Prison.
This view is most probably post-war, as most of the photos of the building even in 1865 show the whitewash on the lower levels as intact, and the Libby Prison sign in place hanging over the downhill sidewalk from the upper street facade.
After the fall of Richmond to Union forces, the prison was used to house Confederate officer prisoners of war, this time with greatly improved physical conditions to include windows with panes in them. Later, it became a museum, and was even dismantled and re-assembled in Chicago, but when it failed as a tourist attraction, the materials of the building were sold off as souvenirs.
As you can see the image was exposed to fire at some point, with scorching around the edges. I’m guessing the age to be between 1870-1880.
Here is a photo from the National Archives that shows the prison in 1865.
For your evening’s delectation, here is a nicely hand-colored CDV of an anonymous lady from Havana, Cuba. This is only the second CDV I have with an association with Cuba – I have a C.D. Fredericks that lists the Havana studio on the back mark, but is not necessarily taken there. In this case, Mr. B. Palmer, Artist, Havana is the only designation, so I must assume the photo was indeed taken in Havana. No street address is mentioned, which would be neat to have to be able to cross-check at some point in the future to see if his studio still stood. The entire backmark is in English, so I wonder if he catered to the tourist trade exclusively. The lady in the photo appears to be an adult, so I’ve called her Dama and not Señorita.
Here’s another portrait by Gardner. Funny thing – Gardner was much more successful in business than Mathew Brady, yet Brady images are far more common than Gardner’s CDVs. I don’t know if it is that he did fewer (certainly seems so) or that his subjects’ heirs are largely holding on to them still. Given the disproportion between his images and Brady’s in the marketplace (not a statistically validated survey, but in my estimation, there’s a 10:1 ratio or more on the Brady:Gardner ratio), I’d say that he just didn’t make that many. This was obviously from his civilian commercial operation, and probably a few years after the Civil War as there is no mention on the back of being “Official Photographer to the Army of the Potomac”. The country as a whole grew war-weary in the aftermath of the war – all aspects of society were changing, and quite radically. Slavery had ended, the agrarian/industrial divide fell heavily in favor of industrialization. Women were a (temporary) presence in the workforce after the death of nearly 700,000 men of working age over four years of truly brutal combat.
With all this change and stress, it’s not a surprise that an association with the US Army that was trumpeted in 1864 would be quickly effaced from advertising copy.
Here’s a photo of Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren, NOT by Mathew Brady, Gurney & Sons, Eisenmann or C.D. Fredericks. I’ve seen a few by the other photographers, but the Brady ones are the most common. This is cool to me as it shows them being photographed in other cities as they toured – celebrity culture is not a new thing, but at least back in that day, technology largely excluded the possibility of ambush paparazzi.
Funny story about that though – back when the White House did not have a secure perimeter with heavily armed guards, one of Abraham Lincoln’s boys was out playing in the yard. An enterprising and rather self-assured photographer approached the boy and talked him in to sitting for some pictures, and then sent him inside to get his dad to pay. Needless to say, Mr. Lincoln was NOT happy about this, and came out to confront the photographer. The photographer consented to not charge Mr. Lincoln if he would sit for a few himself, which he grudgingly did. Try doing that to the first family today!
I found while browsing CDVs on Ebay another Brady CDV with yet another studio address in Washington DC. It was the one I’d been looking for for ages. I had heard a rumor that the studio, which you can still see from the outside of the building, was Brady’s, and I’d heard it was Alexander Gardner’s. But now, I can definitively say you can still see Mathew Brady’s Washington DC studio that was located at 625 Pennsylvania Avenue, Northwest. Today the building is occupied by the National Council of Negro Women, but if you go around back into the alley, you can still see the north light slanted studio window on the top two floors of the building. From what I’ve been told, the room is now storage space for the association, and there’s not much to see. But it’s really cool that this piece of photographic history still exists, and aside from the paint color, you can get a feel for the streetscape in the day when it was a working studio.
I thought I’d do a recap of the images in my collection that show the posing stand to some degree or other.
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 Gullie & Lottie Tarkinton[/caption] |
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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.
A CDV of C.T. Parsloe Jr., a 19th century American comic actor. The pencil script on the bottom says “Important if true”.
I love this image because it shows the power of photography to capture a fleeting moment of expression. This almost feels like it could be a still frame from a movie, unlike so much mid-19th century portrait photography where people are formally posed in elegant albeit highly conventional poses. It’s an image like this that shows Brady’s genius as a photographer – he was able, with 19th century wet-plate technology, to capture the essence of physical comedy. And you can still see the clamp stand behind Mr. Parsloe, which is a real testament to his power of posing, that he could do something so seemingly spontaneous while being physically restrained by the clamp!
I can’t find a lot of bio data on Mr. Parsloe, but he was born in 1836 in New York, and died in 1898, according to this page on the University of Washington’s digital collections archive – U.Wash. Digital Archive
I just discovered the University of Washington’s archive of photos of 19th century actors – it’s a resource I will be returning to to look up more CDV images as I keep collecting.
This is a cabinet card by J. Gurney & Sons of a midget actor in full theatrical costume. I wish I knew the identity of the actor. He must have been famous in the day, because he had Gurney photograph him. Going to Gurney would be somewhat akin to having Richard Avedon or Annie Liebowitz photograph you today. Well, maybe not Richard Avedon, as he’s dead now. But you get the idea.
Here’s a pair of stereoviews of the scenery around Madison Square Park in New York City. They’re effectively a matched set because the one is a view of the Flatiron building looking south from Madison Square Park, and the other is looking up Broadway past Madison Square Park from the Flatiron. The Flatiron building is so-called because of its triangular shape which reminded people of the shape of a clothes iron. It is also one of the most iconic buildings in New York City, and one of the most photographed. It was the first “skyscraper” in New York, and while today it is almost petite in comparison to its uptown neighbors, it was a marvel of construction and engineering in its day.
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