Violet Hammersley, wife of Hugh Hammersley
1892-93
John Singer Sargent
(via fuckyeahvictorians)
In 1906 The Journal of the English Folk Song Society published a piece on the old English ballad “Death and the Lady.” Some enterprising female entertainer encountered the article and realized the story might be used as a great vaudeville piece about the evils of card play and alcohol. Touring performers were always searching for material that would play well in the sticks. The city folks would enjoy the Grand Guignol staging, the traditional song, and the vocal technique. Here Joseph Hall, the Brooklyn born photographer who had made a career on baseball pictures and theatrical production stills, captured the sequence of the action, providing a peculiarly detailed & rare view of the progress of a single vaudeville performance.
Click on images to see larger, richer versions; you can see the complete series of photos on the Historical Ziegfeld website by clicking here.
(via my-ear-trumpet)
When Joseph-Nicephore Niepce took the first photograph in 1828, his photographic plate required an exposure of eight hours. That exposure time was drastically reduced across the course of the nineteenth century, so that by the 1890s the Collodion process had cut exposure times to two or three seconds.
Nevertheless, a three second exposure meant that subjects had to stand very still to avoid being blurred, and holding a smile for that period was tricky. As a result, we have a tendency to see our Victorian ancestors as even more formal and stern than they might have been.
These pictures are drawn from the Flickr group “The Smiling Victorian” and show a perhaps surprising side to the people who’s “now” was a hundred years before our own.
(via my-ear-trumpet)
