1880s or 1890s cabinet card of four children. Highlights are washed out now.
Toronto. Members of the PHSC (and most other readers of this site) collect cameras and/or photos. A few collectors even specialize in photographs. Some are eclectic, some collect by kind, some collect by subject, some collect by process, etc. Our late editor Bob Lansdale was partial to CdVs and other cards where the photograph was made with the carbon process. Carbon process prints do not fade over time.
The cabinet card shown here was printed c1885 in Harriston, Ontario (about an hour north-west of Toronto). While the glass plate in the studio may have been correctly exposed, developed, and printed, today it shows washed-out highlights. If the subjects survived the vicissitudes of childhood and early youth and married, they could be the great- or great-great-grandparents of today’s people.
Visit one of our events and you just may find a photo – cased, carded, mounted or bare – to add to your collection. PS. Visit the auction at the end of this month, and our spring photographica-fair next month (May 28th – see our website’s right hand side bar).
Note: The title of this post is part of a line from Tennyson’s poem, “Blow, Bugle, Blow“. This is a favourite poem of mine, along with his poem “The Lady of Shallot”. Both were memorized about 75 years ago in grade school. As children, we memorized poems but were too young to do any proper analysis.
