I love the personal touch on this card – “Yours with Respect, Chas. Cain” and “Emma” in the negative number spot. He looks like he’s barely old enough to shave, yet out in the world on his own. The handwriting is somewhat unsteady – teenage nerves at dedicating the card to an intended? At first I thought the phrasing was a bit odd for a teenage boy, but that was the 19th century, now we are in the 21st. A 21st century kid would probably not send a picture of himself in an ill-fitting suit to a girl he liked with the inscription “yours with respect” (he’d probably sext her with a photo of his nether anatomy from his cellphone), but “yours with respect” is VERY much in keeping with a 19th century teenager’s style of expression.
Also note the feet of the posing stand peeking out from behind his legs – because photography is so instantaneous these days, it’s something we never experience today unless you happen to get into alternative process photography, so it stands out as anomalous to a modern viewer.
I thought I’d do a recap of the images in my collection that show the posing stand to some degree or other.
C.T. Parsloe, Jr, Actor- by Brady. “Important if true”
Gullie & Lottie Tarkinton[/caption]
Tom Thumb and Minnie Warren, in their advancing years
Commodore Nutt and unknown little woman, Anonymous CDV (probably Brady)
Group, by Alexander Gardner
Two actors in costume by Chas. H. Spieler, Philadelphia
Horatio B. Buck, MD – 1st Lt. 11th Volunteers.
Tintype, Father & Son?
M.E. Bennet, by Schroeder & Rakeman, Washington DC
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.
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