Tag Archives: CDVs

CDVs, Circus Freaks, Collecting, Photography

Two New Circus Freaks – Fat Man, and Little Boy Comedic Sketch

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Pardon the completely coincidental and generally inappropriate reference to the first two atomic bombs. Today for your viewing pleasure we have Frank Williams, professional sideshow fat man, who according to his bio data on the back of the CDV weighed in at 487 lbs at just 18 years of age.

Frank Williams
Frank Williams

According to the Circus Historical Society, he was touring with the King & Franklin New Colossal Shows and Great Wild West in 1888-1890 as part of their sideshow. On a side note, in doing some quick research on Frank, I saw a lot of threads pop up using an image of Frank to start a nasty, snarky discussion of modern-day obesity. It may be true that there are more obese people today than there were 120 years ago, but it’s no excuse for nastiness to those alive today or those long dead. To me it’s victimizing Frank as a sideshow freak all over again, but I wonder how he’d feel about it as exhibition as a sideshow freak was his chosen profession.

Next up, a more pleasant note, is an anonymous CDV of a little person in policeman’s costume with a gigantic fake mustache escorting a pretty girl in a frilly dress. Nothing more is known about it, as there is nothing on the verso either printed to identify the photographer or handwritten to identify the subjects.

Anonymous Little Person and Girl
Anonymous Little Person and Girl
CDVs, Collecting, Photography, Washington DC

Two CDVs from Washington DC photographers

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Anonymous Lady, by Davis of DC and Richmond
Anonymous Lady, by Davis of DC and Richmond
L.M. Blackfoot, by Rice and Rice, Washington DC
L.M. Blackfoot, by Rice and Rice, Washington DC

Two more CDVs from the collection, both by Washington DC photographers. And no, Mr. Davis is no relation that I’m aware of. I acquired these in part because of the beautiful blind stamps on the backs.

CDVs, Chambersburg, Collecting, DC Portraits, Portraits

I’m BAAAACK! To posting that is…

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It’s been a while since I added anything here, because I’ve been insanely busy dealing with a whole bunch of personal business (breaking up, evicting my ex, cleaning up the aftermath, starting dating again, reconfiguring my office, building a new home wireless network since the ex took the wireless router, getting nasty bronchitis, recovering from said bronchitis, etc etc you know…). I haven’t had a lot of time for collecting or thinking about it as a result. Well, the dust has settled and I’ve been casually acquiring an odd and end here and there, so I’m back to writing about it again.

One of the things that has interested me, and helped drive me into this whole civil war period image collecting thing, is my hometown – Chambersburg, PA. Chambersburg was perhaps the most trampled ground north of the Mason Dixon line during the Civil War. Prior to the war, John Brown planned his raid on Harpers’ Ferry while living there, and met with Frederick Douglass to discuss the plans (Douglass advised against attacking the federal arsenal). Jeb Stuart’s cavalry raided it for the first time in 1862. Then Lee’s troops passed through on their way to Gettysburg in ’63, and in 1864 General McCausland’s troops demanded a ransom of $500,000 in US currency or $100,000 in gold, which the town refused to pay, so it was put to the torch.

In digging around on Ebay, I found an image of a man who was born a few towns over from Chambersburg. That got me thinking about the old hometown, and I started searching for Chambersburg related stuff. I acquired a group of photos spanning a good 20+ years of work from a single studio, which in further searching on Ebay seems to have been the most prominent if not the only studio in town at the time.
Here is the image that got me thinking about Chambersburg, a photo of David Eiker, born in Quincy, Pennsylvania. Quincy is a tiny one-stoplight town a few miles east of Chambersburg. This photo was taken at the J. Goldin studio in Washington DC.

Acquired at the same time was a more-or-less unrelated photo of a Mr. R.K. Hopkinson, taken at the Henry Ulke & Bro. studio in Washington DC. The common thread was the Washington, DC studio. Mr. R.K. Hopkinson Served in Company D of the 3rd Massachusetts Heavy Artillery during the civil war.

CDVs, Collecting, Photography, Portraits

Random images

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Two new additions to the collection – an anonymous CDV of what appears to be at least brothers if not twins, one standing the other seated playing the violin. Best guess is late 1860s / early 1870s. The other is another Brady image of Tom Thumb, his wife, and Commodore Nutt, this time with an average man for comparison. It’s funny how these things turn up in groups – I first get the Fairy Wedding CDV, then another different image of the same people shows up shortly after, so I had to buy it!

CDVs, Collecting, Daguerreotypes, DC Portraits, Photography, Washington DC

Three new Victorian photo parlors to add…

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I’ve found two more Washington DC parlors and one New York Daguerrian studio:

J. Golden – 819 Pennsylvania Avenue
Henry Ulke & Bro. – 278 Pennsylvania Avenue

The New York Daguerrian parlor is:

A.J. Beals – 156 Broadway

The address for Henry Ulke’s studio would put him today squarely on the grounds of the US Capitol, not far from the Spring Grotto, if the address is correct. Either they had a different street numbering scheme, the address is in Southeast DC instead of Northwest DC (which would put him at an even more unlikely location, a tiny triangle park just beside the Library of Congress building), or the Capitol grounds were greatly enlarged sometime between the 1870s and 1900. Given how so far so many of these studios’ locations can be accurately pinpointed today, even though the streetscape has changed a lot, I’m liking the probability that the address is correct, and that the streetscape has changed, rather than the location being inaccurate.

Ambrotypes, Cased Images, CDVs, Collecting, Daguerreotypes, Photography, Tintypes

Some comments on collecting

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As I’ve been collecting images, and I do a fair bit of my looking on Ebay, I’ve noticed a couple of interesting albeit off-putting trends. I go back and forth between interest in tintypes, daguerreotypes, and CDVs, with the occasional odd foray into early 20th century images if they include things like cars. In looking for daguerreotype images, I’ve been seeing a lot of what are really very ordinary, common images (no identification of subject or photographer, 1/6 plate to 1/9th plate size, ordinary condition) being listed for astronomical prices ($650 for a 1/6 plate dag? Really?). It’s one of those things that gives you a false impression of the market – seeing all those listings at those stupid prices makes you think that A: your own collection is worth a lot more, and B: if people are listing them for that kind of money, they must be selling for that kind of money. This impression lingers unless you do a search on closed auctions, where you’ll see that most of the successful sales are still in the under $200 range, with the odd exception of some truly rare or exceptional images (1/2 plate, known subject, unusual subject, etc).

Another marketing trend I find a bit odd is the whole “gay interest” tag in the image description. On one level, I get it – the seller is trying to reach out to an under-appreciated market. On the other hand, I question if the people using that tag line understand the “gay interest” thing at all. Two men or two women posing together in the Victorian world did not make them a same-sex couple. They could be siblings, co-workers or just friends. 99% of the time we have zero context to go with any image to make an assessment of the relationships captured in the images. There was no public subculture in the 1850s or even in the 1880s that we would today recognize as analogous to the late 20th/early 21st century gay culture, and as such it would not have been recorded photographically. There is certainly an interest in finding proof of ancestry – “see, we DID exist in the 1850s”. Unfortunately, buying in to the “gay interest” marketing of these images is really just being taken for a ride through ignorance and vulnerability. Don’t get me wrong – it’s certainly fun to speculate what might have been going on behind the scenes of these pictures, and what the relationships of the sitters might be to one another. I have one image in my collection that in the right minds implies no end of off-camera highjinks. But it’s still pure speculation. If you see an image marked “gay interest”, buy it only because you actually like the image, not for any marketing baloney designed to separate more of your hard-earned money from you than is fair.

Collecting, Photography

Washington DC Victorian era photographers’ map

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Washington DC Photographers

Here is a link to the DC photographers’ map. I’ve got some more photographers written down somewhere that I’ll be adding to the map soon. I found addresses on a CDV for Alexander Gardner’s studio, but oddly enough there were A: two addresses not adjacent but still proximate to each other, and B: neither one was the address I thought it was. There is still the remains of a wet-plate era portrait studio that you can see from the alley behind the National Council of Negro Women’s headquarters in the 800 block of Pennsylvania Avenue. Even though it’s not a portrait studio, I’m including Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office on the map as a point of interest because it, like so many of these studios, was presumed lost for decades but only recently re-discovered, and is chronologically and geographically contemporaneous with the studios I’m tracking. At some point I’m sure either the patrons or the staff of her bureau availed themselves of the photographic archives of the studios in the neighborhood to help in finding missing soldiers after the war.

Also interesting – Alexander Gardner began his career in Washington working as Mathew Brady’s studio manager. At some point they had a falling out and Gardner opened his own studio. I didn’t realize it was literally next door to Brady’s.

I can also now definitively place Schroeder & Rakeman’s studio in Northwest DC, having found another photographer making reference to the “Market” at Pennsylvania Avenue, which is where the Navy Memorial is currently located.