Where’s Waldo?
05.28.07 By Derek DahlsadToday at Collector’s Quest is for the sharp-eyed among you — as a photo collector, a goodly chunk of my time is identifying, to the best of my ability, the origins of a photo. Most of the time, this takes a sharp eye. Here’s some examples, you can play along:
First, we have the cars — they look vintage 1920s to 1930s, which gives us a ‘no earlier than’ mark. Because I have the original negatives, I did my best to read the license plates for a year, but still no luck. However, there IS something in this picture to help identify — here’s an even bigger zoom; it looks like there’s a date in the lower left corner of the plate, but there’s more to check than guessing at a year. I had an idea that these photos must be from the area, so I went over to Google and did a little poking around — the “Elect Benson Governor” ornamental license plate must’ve worked — Elmer Benson was the 26th governor of Minnesota, elected in 1936 and started his term in 1937, giving us a relatively firm date of this photo.
Next one up — a series of related photos:
This one doesn’t require any zooming or tricks: it takes analysis of the group as a whole. The set are all related to the Armour Meat Packing Plant in West Fargo, ND, and a few photos have captions on the back, all talking about construction of a water treatment plant. If there’s anything I know, it’s that stories about early North Dakota don’t show up on Google, so I turned to the local newspaper. In a short story on the history of West Fargo, I found this tidbit: “Armour dumped plant sewage into the Sheyenne River until the late 1930s, when lawsuits filed by farmers living downstream forced the plant to build a sewage disposal facility.” Voila! While it doesn’t pinpoint the year, we’ve got a good idea of when these photos originated (if you’d like to see more sewage plant photos - and I know you do! - I uploaded the whole lot here).
Last up - a postcard:
No, there’s no copyright on the card, it’s unused so there’s no postmark, thus, for the most part we’re out of luck when it comes to the regular telltales. I doubt Mount Rushmore is unfamiliar to anyone, and if you remember your history, construction started in 1927 and ended in 1941…but there’s more to the picture for sharp-eyed analysts to get even more accurate with the date. The Rushmore ‘heads’ were built in a certain order: Washington in 1934, Jefferson in ‘36, Lincoln in ‘37, and then Roosevelt in 1939. Zooming in we can see that Washington is mostly done, Jefferson is well along, Lincoln is still shaping up, but Teddy isn’t anywhere to be found. Looking at the Rushmore timeline, that would place this photo somewhere between 1937 and 1939.
I do enjoy photos for artistic and historical reasons, but I’ve always liked puzzles…while not every photo has enough clues to date it, I can’t just assume there’s no clues there. I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat, find a magnifying glass the size of my head, and give photos a good once-over. Unlike variants in action figures or china patterns, there’s no limit to what might turn up in a photo to identify it’s age…and I like the challenge.
Related items currently available for sale
|
|
|
|
|
|
---
Article Tags: Armour, Elmer Benson, identification, photograph================
Gotta Collect? Then You Gotta Connect - Join our Collectors’ Community!
