... be a photograph detective

ROBIN VYRNWY-PIERCE

Dating and identifying old family photographs is mainly a matter of using your brain in the same way in which you would work out a crossword puzzle or a jigsaw.

Just be organized, work to a system and persevere.

A cabinet portrait like this offers scope for some real detective work. It was taken in Australia so first you need to identify the ship, find out who was a sailor, when the ship was in Australia, from naval records, and then pin down the most likely family member. THis picture was in an album bought in a sale in Norfolk and containing a number of pictures by Norfolk photographers.

You should also be able to look at all the possibilities offered by the clues in the picture, pose, hair, costume, thickness of card, photographer’s imprint, and then think ‘outside the box’ in case there is a possibility you had not thought of.

You can also make reasonable assumptions but there must be some evidence to base it on.

Consider your family, work out possible links and hypotheses — ask the questions and try and work out the answers.

One important factor is to consider which pictures go together.
If they are all from the same old album (as the ones used in this feature are) then you can assume they belong together as a family.

Group them by photographer and then by facial similarities. A photographer can be a clue to where they live — but it might be a holiday visit or a trip to see friends.

Sometimes the same person might be photographed by photographers from different places and this could be to do with a marriage and setting up a new home.

Often your detective work will lead you back to the genealogical data you began with, but will have produced new facts that will either back up your conclusions or give you another direction to work in.

The 1860s saw photography really take off and Desideri’s French patent in 1854 of the carte-de-visite revolutionized portrait photography.

From 1859, when it became commercially available, photo portraiture took off and even the working classes could afford a trip to the photographer.
For just a few pence (although still a lot to a working man) you could have a number of copies of a photo to send to relatives and friends.

From the mid 1860s the larger cabinet-sized photos became available, but these did not really take off until the 1880s as the cdv faded from the scene.

The main points about cdv photos from the 1860s are:
- they have thin, poor quality card as mounts, with square corners;
- the picture was generally hand cut and poorly aligned with the card;
- details on the back were minimal, sometimes nothing at all or at most a photographer’s stamp and/or signature.

The soft vignette was popular in the mid to late 1860s.
Hard vignettes were also produced, but mostly there was no masking at all.
Often the surface of the emulsion will be badly foxed by bacterial action, rust or fading; the poses were stiff and formal, and at first taken in an ordinary room which had been adapted to studio purposes.

Often the early photographs just have a plain wall as backdrop or possibly drapes to one side.

The more elaborate painted backdrops and rustic props of the 1870s and 1880s — such as stiles and trees and benches — are not there yet.
The subject is either seated, usually at a small deal table, or standing next to a plinth.

Sometimes they will be shown holding a book in a suggestion of intelligence or noble character — it has been known for the book to be upside down.

Otherwise they might be given some prop, perhaps related to a vocation.
Many of the pictures from this period will also be full face this is because because the photo took so long to take that mechanical devices had to be placed behind the subject to keep their head perfectly still. The easiest way to hide these was to have the subject face the camera.

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