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  See picture at the end

Our home is decorated with antiques and collections, as it’s our belief these items should not be hidden away just to possess them. Many items that have a functional purpose, are still used as intended.

But glass negatives do not lend themselves to display. So they sit in a cabinet in the dark room that Wifey uses as her Ebay photo shoot area. I can justify having them and breaking my “Display It If You Collect It” rule, by insisting I’m a savior of old images, rescuing the past with the hope future generations can see these images and understand the incredible work of these early photographers, especially with photos of everyday life with ordinary people.

My last blog showed some of the first batch of seventeen glass negatives I purchased at auction included in a box lot with a tiny spy camera that I was bidding on. I have added to my negative collection selectively over these last fifteen years with an eye toward interesting subjects, not just landscapes or portraits.

Here are some I think you will enjoy seeing. I have reversed the negatives digitally, to show what the printed pictures would look like. Note the rough condition of some. Also study the backgrounds for interesting items, it’s always the details that delight the viewer.

Common portrait of a woman at the end of the century, in a garden, probably wearing a wedding dress.

While early photos of guitar players might be rare, I find the wood stove interesting.

Sitting at her spinning wheel in this sparsely decorated room with the spindly looking plant, our photographer has captured a pensive look in natural window light.

It must have been a snowy winter when this shot was taken,

Our dapper gentleman is loading a shotgun, in this wonderful outdoor photo.

In the same batch, this Milwaukee Country Club Trophy is for Shooting.

Check out this room, with the gentleman sitting at the typewriter in an office chair and using two hands to type. Note! the great stove in the background with a statuette atop, the laundry drying in the corner, wash basket on the floor.

Check out the shoes on this cross dresser, need I say more.

Have you ever seen a better copy of Huck Finn?  Of course Huck didn’t live on this mansion lined street.

Are these the mothers?

And who can resist chickens in a farm yard?

This one is actually a positive print on glass. Our Gang Comedy In The Streets Of Old Milwaukee. Note the Pabst Beer Sign on Tony Rott’s Saloon and dated 1921.

Now lastly, here is what our young lady looks like from the teaser in my last blog.

These glass negatives are found at all antique and collectible venues, but require a watchful eye to spot.

They come in many sizes and I have some in five different configurations from 4-1/4”x 4-1/4” square to 5” x 7” I also have regular negatives and tin type photos in my collection.

Share with us your collection. 

It happened by accident, I had no intention to start a collection of glass photographic negatives.

It was a cool spring day when we went to a farm auction in Hancock, a Central Wisconsin village in a potato and Christmas tree growing area of the state. It was wifey’s sister who called to entice us to come up and attend, with a phone call listing the antiques and furniture to be auctioned .

We arrived early for the viewing and while Wifey headed to the good stuff, including the costume jewelry, I meandered over to the four hay wagons filled with box lots, farm tools, small equipment, household goods, canning jars and Tupperware. I scoured through any box that seemed interesting and discovered a tiny post war Japanese camera, one that I had seen advertised in comic books in my youth. I though it would make a good addition to my camera collection.

As luck would have it, the auction started with the wagon loads and soon came to the box I had interest in, and with no real competition, the box was mine. I plucked my prize out and set the rest of the box next to our folding chairs, while Wifey waited for her desired items to come up. With little interest as the dish sets, glassware and utilitarian items from the farm house were being parceled out to bidders, I peeked to see the rest of my purchase. While other photo “Stuff” was in the box, I was surprised to find a small, lidded container filled with seventeen square glass plate negatives.

To see the images as they would look printed, I have reversed these negatives for your viewing pleasure.

These are some of what I found, produced at the end of the 19^th century, and dated by this photo of schoolchildren holding a sign from the “Lighthouse School, 1897”, one of several in this first lot I purchased at auction that depicts a school and the students.

Who can resist a smile when viewing this picture of a small child. Have you ever seen a tricycle as old as this one before?

One of several portrait pictures in the lot, many of the negatives are of women and appearing to be on farms.

Two rockers, turned leg plant stands and lamp tables, the gas lamps, woodwork on the open stair case and even the pattern of the rug give insight into the household furnishings of that time period. And what’s with the palm tree?

The prize of this lot, a portrait of an African American man.

Wearing a military style uniform, with that hat on the table, it appears to be from a fraternal group. Very popular and abundant in that time period, often started for the mutual insurance benefit of the members.

From these humble beginnings, the collection has grown. With close to one hundred glass negatives, plus glass slides and some regular negatives, I’ll have to take another turn to show you more in my next blog. While I have purchase some in lots, I have become very selective in subject matter, when price is a concern.

Oh yes, the next installment will have the portrait of the young lady at the top, as she appears in a photo, so stay tuned to my continuing saga of “Its a Negative World.”

As my wifey discussed yesterday, there’s a heck of a lot of postcards out there. People, places, pets, and events, somebody’s turned it into a means of communication, and some of the rarest are D’s favorites – real-photo postcards.

Early in the days of general-public photography, ingenious photopaper suppliers started to offer specialized papers, designed within the specifications of postcard size, with a pre-printed postcard back. Using a regular enlarger and developing process, anyone could turn a photograph into a postcard, and customized cameras and processing equipment made them even simpler. Prior to 1907, the process was a bit limited because postal regulations made senders write their message on the ‘photo’ side of the card, which limited the size of the photo that could be used, and the emulsion side was difficult to write on. A change in the postal rules in 1907 created the postcard we know and love today: 5″ x 3-1/2″, full-frame picture on one side, and the other split 50/50, message and address. With this change, regular photopaper could be sent to the printer and pre-postcarded for easy use.

The quick-and-dirty postcard creation bred a cottage industry of amateur photographers producing scads of postcards for their customers. The owner of a general store could run off a dozen photos of Main Street Podunkville, taken from his store’s front porch, to sell to tourists. Professional photographers could not only produce a nice family photo, but also sell their customers something to drop in the mail to Grandma back in the city. In no time at all, a picture of a parade of picnic could be cruising along in a mailpouch on the floor of a boxcar. Photography expanded from something framed and on the wall to something shared, complete with a caption on the left half of the back.

Identifying a Real-Photo Postcard

Just because a postcard started as a photo doesn’t mean it was developed on postcard-backed photopaper. The most accurate way to tell if a postcard is a real photo is to get out your magnifying glass:

Even modern printing processes have trouble with photographic details; enlarging a photo from a negative doesn’t have the same drawbacks. When you look at a picture closely, you’ll see a pattern of dots in an image produced by a printing press; photos will have a smooth gradient at any magnification.

What Can Be Found In Real Photo Poscards?

Pretty much everything. The subject matter was limited only by what can fit in front of a camera’s lens, and that didn’t leave much out. Some of the most common photo postcards are wither views of buildings and towns, or personal photos of friends and family. The latter can be the most interesting, but the former are often the more valuable. As people try to document their towns or collect memories of their hometown, they will be on the lookout for anything unique that they haven’t seen before. Because real-photo postcards could be as rare as a series of one, they are in high demand. While a small Minnesota resort town may not warrant a professional photographer and a print-run of ten thousand postcards, producing a few dozen using a standard enlarger, a negative taken by the nearest person with a steady arm, and a box of postcard photographic paper was the easiest option. The early years of many small towns were documented this way, and their pictures were sent to the farthest-flung corners that a postman could get to. Real-Photo postcards were printed using older negatives, resulting in historical postcards, but a successful photo may have encouraged an entrepeneur to order up some high-quality cards:

The black-and-white overlay is a real-photo postcard from the 1920s; the color is a professionally printed postcard from a few years later. I don’t know if the other 5 cards from the original photo-set were also converted to color postcards, but when I saw this pair it obviously caught my eye as a rarity.

More To Photo Postcards Than The Picture

The back of the photo postcard can both give clues to its origin, and give an idea of timeframe for the photo. Generally, most producers of the photosensitive postcard paper identified themselves in the stamp-box. Playle’s Auctions has an excellent reference of stamp-box photo postcard manufacturers. Many collectors focus specifically on real photo cards, and it has even spawned a coffee table book of the finer examples. Real Photo postcards are also available in such quantities and demand that eBay has given them their own category. The best place to start looking is, of course, your local antique shops. Invariably, some seller has a box of disorganized postcards that should give you an excellent start at identifying and getting a good look at real photo postcards.