The oldest photos
[Hat tip: Althouse.]
Here’s a fascinating look at the world’s oldest photos. They’re probably older than you think:
But they’re not older than I’d think. That’s because my mother has in her possession a bunch of family photos from the 1850s. If we’ve got personal photos that old (mostly tintypes, I believe), it stands to reason that photos themselves (or to be technical, daguerreotypes) came years earlier.
What’s more, I’ve got something even more rare: home movies from the 1920s on both sides of the family. Each is short, but astounding, at least to me. In one, my mother the thirteen-year-old gets out of the family Model T (or something like that; I’m no car expert) along with her parents and grandparents. My mother, a bit awkward but hammy, poses like a model (and looks like one, too, because she was very slender at the time) in her flapper outfit and cloche.
In the other movie, my father is incredibly handsome and eighteen years old. He’s playing some sort of mini-golf, dressed to the nines in a suit. But then the film segues to a shot of his parents (neither of whom I ever met since they died before I was born) in New York on their way to a Mayday parade. The camera later pans up and down that wonder of wonders, the Woolworth building, tallest in the world.
My family has a strip of photos of my Grandpa, my Dad’s Dad, from the turn of the last century. He’s seventeen or eighteen, and wearing a bowler, He doesn’t look too dapper, though. The hat is too big. My guess is the photographer supplied the hat.
Looking at the pictures, it’s like I went back in time at seventeen to pose for the photographs. Very eerie.
Anyone interested in old photos should definitely check out Czarist Russia in color.
That is a great story!
I do wonder what future generations will do now- they’ll know everything about us. Our legacies posted all over the internet. A little scary.
Our home movies date only to the thirties. There is one from about 1946, my 19 year old mother getting into her father’s plane. I watched it three or four times before I realized that she was getting into the pilot’s seat, for her solo flight.
Good heavens! Get those things copied right away!
My ex-husband was an audiophile in the days before CDs, much less MP-3s (does any right-minded audiophile like digital?); he used to buy an album, bring it home, clean his needle, clean the album, clean his recording heads, get out an excellent cassette tape, and then record the album for posterity (and of course his own use). He’d never play the album again until and unless he needed to make a new cassette. If he just needed a copy of the cassette for a friend or something, he did tape-to-tape (his friends didn’t “rate” a needle’s touching vinyl). Consequently, his albums were MINT.
It sounds as if your home movies are so rare and valuable to YOU, quite aside from their value to society!, that they should be preserved!
My late father made up a collage of family pictures that include one of his grandfather in 1850 and his parents who perished in the Holocaust. The most remarkable part is that he and my uncle were able to retrieve the pictures from the rubble of Poland after WWII.
In preparing for my father’s 80th birthday, my brother (somewhere) found photos of my father’s grandfather’s grandparents! They were not young at the time, nor elderly. I’m guessing 1875 or so, in Italy.
Speaking of which, if it’s not already obfious, do not let a consumer video lab touch those old movies if you want to convert them to digital. They will slice them up, cut away leaders and trailers–and frames–and throw the cut-offs out. Find a specialty outfit where you talk to the fellow who does it, and where his equipment can handle the film very gently.
njcommuter: Quite a few years ago I tried to have the movies duplicated. The end product was very speeded up and not particularly watchable. I might try again. One of the problems is that the old movies are quite brittle and delicate. They are all spliced together as part of a larger reel.
I wrote about the wonder of gazing upon the weathered faces of men who’d fought in the American Revolution:
<blockquote cite="It's astonishing that we can look into the same eyes that gazed upon the Founding Fathers.
BBC journalist and longtime host of PBS' Masterpiece Theater Alistair Cook was fond of telling people he met that, "You've just shaken the hand of the hand that shook the hand of Abraham Lincoln." Cook had met Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes when he was a young reporter stationed in Washington, D.C. Holmes had served during the Civil War and had met President Lincoln. So, from Lincoln to Holmes, Holmes to Cook, Cook to his new acquaintance.
It's entirely possible that one of these long-lived veterans of the Revolutionary War might have provided a direct link to George Washington, a handshake spanning three or four centuries.
The past is much closer than we think — often just a handshake away."
Oy, did I screw up that HTML code — sorry!
Ah. What a priceless legacy—a family fortune that can’t be counted.