Photo ops at the turn of the 20th Century…

“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” – Malcolm Stevenson Forbes (19 Aug 1919 – 24 Feb 1990)

At left, a scan of four pages from a small soft-bound photo album put together in approximately 1905 by Nellie Alice Kemp [Freeman] (7 Feb 1882 – 27 Jul 1966), a teacher who was an aunt to my aunt Dorothy May Tenney [Cole](3 May 1910 – 19 Mar 1990). Below, a series of enlargements from
these four pages plus a few cropped-in images in order to take a better look at the faces. Each of the eleven pages that constitute the album measures 5-1/4″ x 7″, with each albumen print measuring 2-1/4″ x 3″. The only annotations in white ink inside indicate a few place names in the Nova Scotia
Bay of Fundy area. None of the individuals portrayed in these early ‘virtual’ snapshots are named – except one ‘Myrtle’ standing in front of a shoreline – nor are dates given. None of the faces look familiar to my eye, which has gotten knowledgeable about my
family’s physiognomy by studying numerous images lately. There’s a good chance I have no traceable relationship to any of those portrayed since they were growing up in Nova Scotia, a good distance away from my roots in Dayton, Maine.
Thanks to this disconnect, these early ‘snapshots’ become ‘art’ instead of ‘just family history’ for me; they reveal a timeless quality. They’re a reminder that people really did wear clothes like that at one time, even for a picnic. Plus there’s the beguiling humanity of mugging
for the camera; the obvious fact that candid as well as posed photo ops of this nature were popular, then as now… Indeed We Are Family!

“Good questions outrank easy answers.”
– Paul Samuelson (15 May 1915 – 13 Dec 2009)

Below, friend Heinz Sauk-Schubert who lives in Portsmouth NH sent me his impressions evoked by these antique images from yesteryear.

“It’s surprising to me that everyone, dressed in their finery, had no compunction sitting on grass, lying and rolling in it, leaning against trees or rocks, and gingerly stepping, not always knowing exactly into what. Ordinary people appear to have had a pervasive kind of
tact that perhaps touched every aspect of their lives. And the images of family picnics speak of a geniality that contemporary picnic images rarely convey. Perhaps it is a matter of distance in time. Perhaps I project a kind of nostalgia onto the image that then blends with my perception
of it. While that may be partly true, I doubt it explains all that I read into the images and the world they present. I mean, how can one look at the picnic images and not think of Edouard Manet’s painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe? The
picnic in the woods painting that ushered in Impressionism?”