Men Looking Silly: Favorite Photos Friday

During photography’s infancy – from 1839 up to the Civil War – having your photograph taken was a serious matter that probably occurred only once in your lifetime  You would put on your best clothes, go to the photographer’s studio on a sunny day, sit very still for the long exposure time, often with your head in a brace to keep from moving.  No wonder so many early subjects look terrified.

 But toward the end of the 19^th century, exposure times were shorter, photographer’s studios were everywhere and the cost was lower, so people started joking in their photos.  Victorians thought it was hilarious to cross-dress for the photographer—men wearing large flowered hats, women in derbys and cutaways.

A while back I did a series of tinted cards called “Vintage Fashion Victims” and "More Vintage Fashion Victims",  based on photos of Victorian women in outrageous or funny garb.  But men could look even more ridiculous for the photographer, as you can see here.

 The four men above are, I think, all actors recreating their best roles.    The two cabinet cards by W. L. Shoemaker, of Phoenixville, Pa. showing men dressed as royalty? or courtiers? , were probably used to advertise the thespians, the way headshots are today, or they were collected by their fans. In pencil on the back of the guy with the mustache is “George Leister.”   The man without the mustache is identified in pencil on the back as “Walter Shoemaker” –which I realized is also the last name of the photographer. Could it be a photograph he took of himself in fancy dress?

The “clown” photo, taken by “The Popular Studio” in Haverhill, MA., has no ID on the back, but his ragged clothes suggest he is playing a hobo/clown role—probably in vaudeville.

The long, skinny cabinet card of a man dressed in velvet clothing, big lace collar, flower over his ear, lost in a book—is the cliché of a poet, undoubtedly another theatrical role.

 While the men above are dressed for the theater, I think this skater, photographed in Boston, may be seriously trying to commemorate his skill on the ice.  (Remember that all these photos are taken inside a photographer’s studio,  with props and painted background to suggest they’re outdoors.)

This carefully posed gentleman, with his rifle and faithful dog, photographed in Dresden by a photographer named Otto Mayer, is definitely not being funny.  With his cigar in his mouth and his hunting clothes, he knows he is the picture of the intrepid hunter.

 Now this guy, whom I call “The Leaning Man” is definitely trying to be funny with the props he found in the photographer’s studio.  This is a “real photo” post card, which may be later-- into the 1900’s-- than the cabinet cards. 

The leaning man looks a lot to me like this fellow,  jauntily wearing a lady’s hat for his calling-card-sized tintype.   They’re probably not the same person, but  they have a similar sense of humor, and probably both could be counted on to be the life of the party, even if it meant wearing a lampshade on their head. 

Favorite Photos—Behind the Wheel of the Great Race

When I scanned these two vintage photos from my collection for my “Favorite Photo Friday” post, I thought they were just two amusing scenes of Victorians posing proudly in photographers’ studios behind the wheel of one of those those new-fangled horseless carriages.

That’s pretty much the story of these two ladies.  Don’t you love their elaborately flowered hats?  They are in front of a painted background, which is meant to give the impression that they are traveling down a country road, but in fact these ladies probably never actually had the opportunity to drive a car in their lifetimes.

Their photo is a small tintype, 2 ½ by 3 ½ inches in size that was enclosed in a paper folder with an oval opening.  Tintypes first became popular during the Civil War and continued into the 1900’s—usually, in the later years, sold as a souvenir of an outing to somewhere like Coney Island or the Boardwalk at Atlantic City.

 But this photo of two rather foreign-looking men in hats turned out to have a much more interesting story once I started looking at the clues within the photo.

First of all, this is a “real photo” postcard.  It was a process created by Kodak in the early 1900’s that allowed a photograph to be printed on a postcard backing.

These men are sitting in an impressive-looking automobile against a painted background which includes two signs saying “San Francisco 24 miles.”

If you turn the card over, you see that it was postmarked “San Francisco, Nov. 24, 3:30 p.m. 1908” and mailed to  Maria Bruner at 12 Denison , New London Connecticut.  The message part—written in a very pale and faded green pencil, cannot be deciphered but it’s clearly in Italian.  Also written on the back is the price I paid for the card: $7.50.

You can see that the driver’s steering wheel is on the right and that just below it is the name “ZUST.”

Since I know less than nothing about automobiles, I thought this might be part of an automotive brand name, but when I googled those four letters I learned a whole lot:  Zust was an Italian car manufacturing company operating from 1905 to 1917, and the most famous Zust car was the red 1906 Zust which took third place in the 1908 Race Around the World, also called The Great Race.

Now I never saw the 1965 comedy "The Great Race" starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Natalie Wood, but I found the description of the Great Race of 1908 absolutely fascinating.  The plan was to drive from New York City, USA to Paris France with a 150-mile ship passage from Nome across the Bering Strait to East Cape, Siberia.  It began on Feb. 12, 1908 in Times Square. The six cars represented four nations:  Germany, France, Italy and the United States.  The Zust represented Italy.  The American Thomas Flyer car, in the lead, crossed the United States, arriving in San Francisco in 41 days, 8 hours and 15 minutes.

Only three of six competitors completed the race: and the Italian Zust came in third.  The Germans got to Paris four days ahead, but they were penalized a total of 30 days for not going to Alaska and for shipping their car part of the way by rail car, so the Americans, namely George Schuster, won by 26 days.  The Italians arrived in September 1908. (Throughout much of the race there were no roads, and  “Often,” according to Wikipedia, “the teams resorted to straddling the locomotive rails with their cars riding tie to tie on balloon tires for hundreds of miles when no roads could be found….The race was of international interest with daily front page coverage by the New York Times.”)

No wonder these two Italian men look so proud to be photographed sitting in an automobile which bears the name of the famous winning Italian car, the Zust.  This is clearly not the exact car that participated in the race, (photo below) but it seems to be an authentic model. This  souvenir real-photo postcard was mailed only two months after the Italian car arrived triumphantly in Paris, so this little postcard was no doubt a treasured souvenir of patriotic pride.

(P.S. I’m a day late in this “Friday” post because yesterday I drove back to Massachusetts after a week in New York hanging out with number-one granddaughter Amalía.  Good times!)

A Mystery – Is this a Lost Portrait of Lord Byron?

(The story behind the photograph)

Last weekend I was lucky to attend a couple of fascinating photo shows in New York City including the AIPAD photography show in the Park Avenue Armory, featuring vintage and contemporary photos at amazingly high prices.

At another photo show nearby I did find some vintage photos I could afford, and one of them was a 1/4 plate ambrotype of an oil painting of Lord Byron in a half case. It even had tinted cheeks. (It’s at the top row above—both in and out of its protective case, metal mat, preserver and cover glass. Click on it to make it bigger.)

The dealer who sold me the image said he thought it was “some actor” but I knew that it was the famous English poet George Gordon Lord Byron. In fact I thought it was a photograph of some famous Byron portrait that I had possibly studied in college when I was minoring in art history. (Naturally I didn’t mention this to the dealer, and managed to negotiate a reasonable price for the ambrotype.)

So when I got home with the cased photograph, I started googling portraits of Lord Byron to see which painter had painted “my” image…I quickly learned that the most famous portrait of Byron, painted in 1814, was by Thomas Phillips. It’s the one in the second row above. He also painted the portrait of Byron in Albanian dress, in the third row.

Other images of Byron are in the row below. Most of them were done during Byron’s lifetime (1788 – 1824) --- or shortly after.

Lord Byron was, of course, sort of a rock star in his day. He created the idea of the troubled and troublesome Byronic hero. Lady Caroline Lamb famously called him “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Mothers of young ladies of London wouldn’t even let their daughters look at him because he was so notorious for seducing every woman who crossed his path – including his half sister — and then dumping them, causing heartache and madness. He liked young boys too.

Lord Byron clinched his fame by dying tragically in Missolonghi, Greece in 1824 as he was fighting (and donating his large fortune) to help the Greek people achieve independence from the Turkish occupation. (Today, March 25, is Greece's Independence Day. They finally succeeded in tossing out the Turks after 400 years. Zito Hellas!)

As the most famous Philhellene, Lord Byron is beloved in Greece. Streets and baby boys are named after him, and whenever I’m in the center of Athens I pass a large statue of the dying Byron, clasped in the arms of a woman representing Hellas -- Greece. When Byron died of the flu (and the lousy medical treatment by his doctors—especially the bloodletting) he was only 36 years old.

But the more I searched, the more surprised I was to see that --while the face of Byron in paintings and drawings was almost identical to that in my ambrotype, none of the portraits I found was identical. The flowing lacy collar of his open shirt and the hairline -- the way his curls fell on his forehead --were always different from the version I have. (But the way his hair is receding at the temples remains consistent in all.)

This led me to wonder if by any chance my ambrotype was a record of a “lost” oil portrait of Byron by some famous nineteenth century artist?? The ambrotype photographic process (the second kind of photography after daguerreotypes) was introduced in 1854, peaked in 1857-59 and waned in 1861 when the more convenient and inexpensive tintype became popular.

So my ambrotype of a Byron portrait was probably made around 1857. The painting really resembles the Phillips portrait and could even possibly be another portrait of Byron by the same hand??

If it really is a lost portrait, of course, it makes the ambrotype I bought more valuable.

You can see in my scan that there is a frame around the painting that was photographed. If this is a frame to the oil painting, it could help identify the original. On the other hand, it could be the metal preserver on another ambrotype or daguerreotype — which would make my image a “copy image” and therefore less valuable.

An ambrotype is a negative image on glass that becomes a positive image when you put a dark background behind it. Every daguerreotype and ambrotype is one-of-a-kind…and reversed — a mirror image of the sitter. The only way to make a copy of a dag or an ambro was just to photograph the image all over again—and that comes out less sharp.

I hope to solve the mystery of my “lost Portrait of Byron” by sending these scans to both the Byron Society of America and to the newsletter of the Daguerreian Society, of which I am a member.

In the end, I may find out that my “lost” Byron portrait is in fact a well-known image that everyone else can identify. And that’s okay, because I’m still delighted to have the striking image of a beautiful painting of one of our most famous poets.

If anyone has any info on this subject – please let me know at joanpgage@yahoo.com

My Funny Valentine & “Playing with Pictures—The Art of Photo Collage”

When I go into my favorite store—Target-- I always look at what’s in the $1.00 section. Recently it was all about Valentine’s Day and I gravitated straight to these ugly velvet roses that cost a dollar each. “These are so bad they’re good!” I said, snagging three of them. Daughter Eleni feared I would put them in her (unoccupied) room but I promised I wouldn’t. Now they’re in one of the upstairs bathrooms.

I do like things that are whimsical—And today, as I drove into Manhattan on my way to tomorrow’s flight to Mexico, I made a bee-line to an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called “Playing with Pictures—The Art of Victorian Photocollage.”

Since I am an avid collector of antique photos and I love anything whimsical, I knew this show was for me for many reasons.

The exhibit, which I highly recommend,(Google it!) focuses on albums made by aristocratic English women back in the 1860’s and 1870’s by cutting out photographs of people they knew (often titled and royal) and gluing them into fantasy scenes which the women painted or drew. It’s a trip. Check out 2 examples above.

The exhibit was charming and highlighted something that I have noticed for many years—women in Victorian times poured their creativity into creating friendship books, scrap albums , folk paintings and things like these exquisite and humorous album pages—just to amuse themselves and their friends. I bought the catalogue and may write about it in future. You could see in the photo collages the fantasy influence of books like Louis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.”

But since I’m off to Mexico in the morning and will be participating in all sorts of crazy Carnival activities in Oaxaca (which I will report, including a crazy faux wedding ceremony and lots of devils and transvestites) I will only say a few things about Victorians and photographs.

In 1839, when the first photographic process was announced by Louis Daguerre, having your portrait taken “by the sun” was a serious business. For twenty years, through the daguerreotypes and the ambrotypes that followed, you had to go to a photographer’s studio—usually lighted by a skylight (because sunlight was required) and you had to sit very still—possibly with a head brace. Children were strapped into chairs to keep them still. Sometimes moms were seated in the chair, covered with a sheet and then they clutched the toddler to keep him still long enough for the photo. If someone died, the photographer would come to the house to make the only photograph his loved ones would have to remember him or her.

Many people gazed at the camera in total terror—having no idea if the photographic process would hurt or not. (And many daguerreotypyists became ill from the chemicals needed to develop the polished metal plates into photographs.)

But in the 1850’s and 1860’s—in time for the American Civil War—they invented metal tintypes, which a solider could carry in his pocket or send home in an envelope, and cardboard cartes de visite, --the size of a calling card--which could be made in multiples for a very low price.

This created a mania for collecting photographs of freaks and famous people, and putting them into albums, and exchanging photos among friends. And many women —especially the aristocratic English women who were encouraged to develop talents like painting, decorating china and playing the piano, as well as croquet and fox hunting—turned their creative drive into making albums of amusing and fantastic pages on to which they glued cut-out images of their titled friends.

The exhibit at the Met makes a big point about how this was done by aristocratic English women, but I know from collecting Victorian photo albums that ordinary women and men in the U. S. as well, turned their photographic experiences into humorous portraits. Before the carte de visite and the tintype, it was an extremely serious business sitting for the photographer. But many funny Victorian photos exist as tintypes or cartes de visite, such as cross-dressing ones like the gentleman above wearing a woman’s hat. Cross dressing and funny poses are frequently found in tintypes and cartes de visite (and if you want to sell me any, let me know.)

I have collected Victorian scrapbooks, photo albums, friendship books and tintypes which display lots of humor and creativity. I want to write more about them later, as I think they are an art form that has been ignored up till now but deserves to be recognized. But for now I’ll just show you the tintype above of a man in a woman’s hat and also the collage a young woman made of her own portrait surrounded by cigar labels. It is a kind of collage that lines a bowl and that sells for big bucks today.

More later. Now I’m off to Oaxaca, Mexico and some crazy happenings to mark carnival!