Sunday, December 19, 2010

Photo Number 401

Old couple AC Isaacs Motley Antique Shop copy
What a happy old couple..then I thought how old do you suppose they were.. 50? Perhaps they look older to me because they look sad.  This photo was more than likely taken in the early 1890’s.
Old couple AC Isaacs Motley AS  This is the back of the CdV   A. C. Isaacs of 217 Main Street Madison, Wis.

Thanks for stopping by, do come again:)

5 comments:

  1. They do look sad and he, especially, looks tired.

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  2. I wonder if these two might be Mr. and Mrs. Freudenberg. Or perhaps the parents-laws of their children.

    There are many interesting pictures here:

    http://www.thirdlakeridge.org/results.asp?Street_No=&Street=

    Showing the C and NW railroad station, a loyalty parade (remember the anti-german thing?) and site mentions an employee that worked for Isaac's.

    One of the Guhr's worked for the C and NW railroad. There seems to be a connection here that I am missing - sorry... my head is tired this morning.

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  3. A picture is worth a thousand words (couldn't help the pun)

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  4. I am sure others have posted this before but because of the slower exposure process, it was easier for photographers to have their "models" not hold a smile. I read somewhere that trying to hold a smile often resulted in an unattractive final product (try it and you'll see that the longer you try to hold a smile, the harder it is to hold still and also the weirder it starts to look). Somber expressions with stilted poses (as in this example where the man is sitting and the woman standing with her hand resting on his shoulder) kept the models from moving during the slow exposure process.

    Of course, this started with daguerreotypes and even when new innovations would allow for faster exposure processes, tradition will slow things down. How a portrait was done pretty much stayed the way portraits should be done until artists began embracing photography as a legitimate art form and started experimenting with how it could be used to evoke movement and emotion. This eventually resulted in affecting paintings as well, so that painters who saw artistic photographers were affected by the photographs to experiment with such things as abstractions and cubism and such.

    I wish I could directly quote for you but I lost the textbook I used in art history ages ago in a move. :(

    Of course, I could be completely misremembering my facts. Unfortunately, the memory blurs with time.

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  5. Iggy, This photo is from the Motley Antique Shop..the other photos of Josephine Guhr were from the Royalton Antique Shop:)
    Satia, Thanks for the explanation..you explained it much better than I could have:)

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Hi, Thanks for the comments, your input on these old photos is appreciated! English only please! All comments will be moderated! Connie