Nineteenth Century Photo Album

established in July 2003 by David Zeitlyn

A school group in Staffordshire(?) towards the end of the Nineteenth Century. Enlarging the image in order to try and read the message on the blackboard a ring on the finger of the woman holding the board becomes visible. This is not visible to the naked eye, and is a small, perhaps trivial, may be not, example of what work with digitised images can achieve.
You can see the full image from which this detail has been extracted Photo 9

This project starts with an album of 22 Nineteenth Century Photographs purchased at a car boot sale in Cambridge on 29 June 2003. As a social anthropologist I am interested in ways in which photographs act as repositories of meaning and ways in which their meaning may be changed as information about them is made available. I am not a photo historian nor do I work on Staffordshire history so, inspired by the Open Source software movement, I am going to use the photographs as the kernel of a collaborative research project: any people inspired to contribute are welcome to send in contributions which will be added to the project website. If interest seems to warrant it I may add a discussion list and other collaborative research tools in due course.

To begin with there only the photographs and some basic information about them, culled from the inscriptions and the photographers information on the back of some of the 'cartes de visite'.

Summaries

People named

Mrs Marsh, Photo 19

Charles Noel Dixon, age 12 Months 1894, Photo 11

Mrs Wm Robertson and children , Photo 4

Named photographers

G Renwick, Burton on Trent, Photo 6

L.E. Desmarais, 14 St.Lawrence, Montreal c1870 according to http://www. rootsweb.com/~qcmtl-w/photographers.htm#D, Photo 5

R. Hudson, Birmingham, Photo 13

Fieldhouse & Lamb, Rugeley, Photo 14 According to Heather Dowler, Research and Data Co-ordinator, Staffordshire Past Track this shows Trent Valley Railway station in Rugeley. Photographers: Fieldhouse and Lamb.

William T Davey, Acton, Photo 16

I. Bosworth, Rugeley, Photo 17

Sunderland & Hudson, Birmingham, Photo 18

T. Lloyd, Southport, Photo 19

W. Baker, Birmingham, Photo 11

A&G Taylor, Liverpool, Photo 3

W.Croydon, Westbourne Park London, Photo 1

Currie and Bridges, Hyde Park London, Photo 20

W& J. Stuart, Brompton Road London, Photo 21

This work is being made available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/bfa/fph00.htm

Another example of similar collaborative research is Judith Robertson's site: http://robertson.ss.emory.edu

Added in July 2020
Two more examples of similar projects:
The Anonymous Project and
Alan Ward's book "Photographs from Another Place".

Seeing the ring:

a collaborative research project on a Nineteenth Century Photo Album

established in July 2003 by David Zeitlyn

Summaries

People named

Named photographers