Navigating the Heartache WWI Brings
Once upon a time in America, a large number of people lived in abject poverty, out of sight and out of mind. Photojournalist Jacob Riis’s 1890 book How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York revealed this hidden community to the affluent and middle class. His book was an expose on tenement…
The Victorians gave us many things: the white wedding dress, air conditioning, the concept of childhood, the automobile, increased women’s rights and the telephone, just to name a few. They also gave us pornography. Yes, pornography. Soon after the invention of photography, the erotic industry was born. “The Victorian period is a key moment in the history…
Photography has come a long way in the past 200 years. It’s hard to believe in today’s age of the selfie, photo sharing apps and Internet photo albums that there was a time when a person might only have been photographed once in a lifetime. We forget that not that long ago, digital cameras, one-hour…
Post-mortem photography is one mourning ritual that did not survive the Victorian era. These photographs (also known as death photos, mourning portraits or memorial portraits) were, as the name implies, taken of a deceased person. They were popular almost from the invention of photography until around 1900 when it became possible for ordinary people to own a…