WOW! BOY IN A DRESS! by PAT STREET

Ever see an item title on eBay like “CDV BOY IN A DRESS! OMG! WOW!!” or “ADORABLE LITTLE GIRL IN OVERALLS 1892”? Sellers should know: there is nothing amazing about a boy in a dress, and it’s extremely unusual to find a nineteenth-century girl in overalls or trousers of any kind. If you’re selling an old photograph and are in any doubt, call it a child, not a boy or girl.

To determine the gender of a child in an antique photograph, you have to remember that the styling of children in the nineteenth century was very different from the styling of children today. Before 1900, boys wore dresses and had long hair until they were five or six  (or older), when they were “breeched” (graduated to trousers) and got their first haircut (not necessarily in that order). Still, there are ways of telling young boys from girls. Think “Hair, Clothes, Props, Pose.”

First, if you’re lucky, a name will be written on the back of the photo. Don’t jump to conclusions, though – someone may have thought a boy was Aunt Mabel because he’s wearing a dress. (You also have to keep in mind that boys’ names included Marion, Shirley, Beverly, Evelyn, Vivian, etc.)

The guidelines I give below apply generally to photographs of children in North America and Europe. All of my examples are of caucasian children, but the guidelines also apply to children of other ethnic groups. Note: I have seen exceptions to every one of these guidelines, and I’ll show you some later on. Today, I’m talking about hair -- next time, clothes. 

HAIR

With or without a name to help you, hair style is the most reliable indicator and the first thing to consider.

  

•  Throughout the nineteenth century, girls wore their hair parted in the center, and boys wore theirs with a side part.  This rule was so inflexible that sometimes it’s the only way to tell the gender of a child. BUT THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS. (Below: boy, girl, boy; girl, boy, girl)

 

•  Boys often wore their hair in long ringlets or curls, sometimes even with hair ribbons. If it’s parted on the side, it’s a boy; if it’s parted in the center, it’s usually a girl.  (Boy, boy, girl; boy, boy, boy; boy, girl, girl)

 

•  Here’s a set of twins from around the turn of the century –Floyd and Florence. Notice the way their hair is parted. (Boy, girl.)

 

•  Mothers often coaxed boys’ hair (not girls’) up into a center ridge or wave, which could be quite extreme. This Kewpie-wave was sometimes started when baby boys had hardly any hair. When a child’s hair was a bit longer, often there was a center curl tumbling down onto the boy’s forehead. (These are all boys.)

 

•  Sometimes when a child was ill with a fever, his or her head was shaved, so occasionally you may find a photograph of a girl with extremely short hair, sometimes pulled tightly back, or a bald head. (These are girls.)

Coming soon:  How to tell gender by clothes.

For more information on Pat Street, click here 

FINDING CARMEL BENNOON by ALBERT TANQUERO

Carmel Bennoon. A name on a Junior College ID - the only clue I had when I first bought this collection of about 100 photobooths and snapshots, of the same woman over the course of her life.

Photobooths can be found at almost any market, but 100 of the same woman is something magical.  I bought the lot about three years ago, from vendors at Kane County Flea Market - just north of Chicago.

They had cleaned out an estate and it turned out that a couch had a small box of photobooth pictures inside of it.  A rather peculiar place to store your snapshots, I’d say. Apparently, there were no direct relatives to inherit the photos.

When I got home and had a chance to analyze the collection, I wondered who this woman was.  I was amazed to see a young girl turn into a mature woman in a matter of minutes.  She was aging right before my eyes - gracefully, as she was always quite beautiful and stylish.

I ended up doing some research and found out that she was Jewish of Eastern European descent, had grown up on the north side of Chicago and ended up becoming a high school teacher.  I looked at the photobooths wondering what Carmel had thought of as the camera clicked. Did she ever find love? Was teaching what she had expected? How did Chicago treat her? And did she feel content later on in life? 

In these photos I saw someone who was poised, beautiful, strong, melancholic, and at times disappointed.  In reality, when I looked at the photos I saw myself.

All of us that collect or enjoy snapshots are looking at a reflection of something…of humanity. We are seduced by feelings of nostalgia, hoping to go back in time to revisit something lost or unresolved. Mortality looks us right in the eye and we can’t let go. I’m sure Carmel experienced happiness in her life. I see the sparkle in her eyes all the way to the very last photos taken of her. And what more can you ask for than moments of happiness?

I treasure this collection more than any of my other photos.  It’s one woman’s life encapsulated in small 1 1/2 x 2 inch cuts of paper.  Above is a sample of some of the photos from the collection.

Click here to see what Albert has done with other photobooths from his collection

Click here to see Albert's site on ebay 

LONESOME by JOEL ROTENBERG

Snapshot people tend to get interested in genres and categories and restrict their collecting habits accordingly. Most of the entries in this blog focus on one or another such aspect of the larger enterprise.

But art is all about feeling, photography is all about feeling, and snapshots are all about feeling. What else could they be about? Nobody’s been talking about that.

“Feeling” can be a subtle thing. Let’s not be subtle. Here I’ve tried to use snapshots to nail one simple and very specific feeling that I happen to like. The snapshooters didn’t put it there. So who did?

The idea that a composition or other formal feature might be unintended is easy to understand: with billions of snapshots, there’s going to be a measurable number of such accidents. It’s a little harder to see how a feeling (one people agree about) could be unintentional.

The key is that when a snapshot “has” a feeling for us, that feeling arises not just from its subject but, crucially, from its formal properties, which can in turn be unintentional—or at least due to some original nonexpressive purpose we can only guess at. For instance, consider the subject’s interesting remoteness from the camera in most of my examples—its “lostness” within the frame. If this wasn’t a complete accident, it might conceivably have come about in some cases because the photographer was hoping to catch the subject unawares, or just thought it was a good idea to include the subject’s surroundings in the shot. But we read it quite differently. The feeling we pick up (and can’t help picking up) comes from formal properties that almost certainly weren’t intended to carry it—properties that, before these pictures got yanked out of their original context, didn’t carry it. 

Now that is a strange state of affairs. Nobody created the feeling. However, I took it from there. Part of what snapshot collectors notice, choose, and assemble has to do with emotional tone. Here I’ve drawn attention to one such tone (which might not have been that striking in any one picture) by bringing together a lot of examples of it.

And, more broadly, I’m also trying to draw attention to this aspect of what snapshot collectors do, or can do. Artists who use found objects are usually interested in something about the look of them (as opposed to the mere fact of them). Duchamp’s original readymades are a good example—their elegance is part of the joke. But snapshots, which are found objects of a kind, have not just a found look, but a found emotional tone. Does any other kind of found object give you that to play with? I don’t think so.

For more information on Joel Rotenberg, and other guest bloggers, click here. 

FOR BETTER OR WORSE by STACY WALDMAN

Did they have happy lives together or did they feel trapped?   Here, some share a joke and others appear stern, à la American Gothic.    We'll never know what their lives were like, but we can imagine.