There’s a historic portrait post in the LF section and think it would be interesting to do a smaller format version.
I believe in an old saying “even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while”. It certainly has applied to me as I’ve had my share of acorns.
I’ve been a photo collector since the mid 60’s when no one paid much attention to photography other than the pictures in the family album. Vintage photos were plentiful and cheap. It was common to walk into an antique store and find stacks of prints, cabinet cards and CDV’s for 50 cents to a dollar. Tintypes, Ambrotypes and Daguerre types were a few dollars up and at the most $5-35 depending on whether there were loose or in a case.
About 25-30 years ago my wife, who’s a painter, and I made the rounds looking for reference images for a series of paintings sh was working on. She found a Victorian album full of cabinet cards for nearly nothing a bought it. As we were leaving the owner said he had some older images and took us to another display case. In it was a tintype of a man in a military uniform and several other uninteresting images. I asked the price snd he said $75 but I didn’t buy it and started home. On the way home I got thinking civil war soldier in uniform, that’s valuable so I went back and bought it.
Not knowing who it was I went to the book stores civil war section and on the cover of one of the books was that image. The person was General George Armstrong Custer shot by Mathew Brady in 1865.
To my eye, having a good knowledge of wet plate, it appears authentic but I had it authenticated by an expert and it in fact is an original.
Please excuse the snapshot. I have it in a shadow box on the wall in my home and didn’t want to remove it.
So post your family portraits or “acorns”, historic images, that you’ve found over the years.
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