Untitled
1914
Two gelatin-silver snapshots from 1914 mounted on an album page, composed to preserve casual moments of everyday rural life and annotated by hand.
You first notice the intimate, improvised quality: on the left two figures cling to a young tree with an early automobile and simple houses behind them, while on the right a woman in a wide-brimmed hat walks past a wagon and a man leading a horse, all set against a pale sky and surrounded by handwritten dates on the dark album paper.
These vernacular photographs illustrate the rise of amateur photography and the family album in the early twentieth century, showing how portable cameras let ordinary people record and shape personal memory and social life.
Medium
Gelatin silver prints adhered to album page
Dimensions
5 1/8 × 6 3/8" (13 × 16.2 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Accession
880.2010.a-b
Palette
Exhibitions
