About the original antique photos
I love the directness of antique photography. Today all humans are bred from an early age to grin widely and falsely when a camera is pointed at them, but in the 19th century having your picture taken was a serious matter, sometimes even (to judge from their expressions) an unsettling or distressing one. People didn’t avoid grinning just because photographic exposure times were so long, or because their teeth were bad, or because they had a metal clamp on the back of their neck. It was a matter of dignity. Mark Twain, not known for his humorlessness, observed,
A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.
More than that, it seems to me that 19th century people were more emotionally unguarded when being photographed. Maybe the technology was still so new that they hadn’t yet figured out who they were supposed to be when standing in front of a camera.
The original antique photos in my artwork come from a variety of sources, including public domain digital images available online, and pictures from my own private collection. Original images date from the beginning of photography in the 1840s through the World War I era, and span a variety of the early photographic technologies, including ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, cabinet photos, glass negatives, stereoviews, and real photo postcards.
Most photographers whose work I feature, and their subjects, are long ago forgotten, but I also repurpose images from some of the greats of the 19th century, including Julia Margaret Cameron and Matthew Brady.
For those who are interested, read on for some of the sources of these images.
Free Public Domain Images
The Library of Congress has some excellent images in their Prints and Photographs Catalog, if you are willing to wade through a mountain of photos that have oodles of historical value, but often not much artistic interest.
Google Art Project has some interesting and very high resolution images of early photography, if you are willing to hunt.
Wikimedia Commons features the Google Art Project images in easily searchable and downloadable format, plus many more images of varying scan quality. There are some excellent images by Julia Margaret Cameron here.
Flickr’s The Commons is another good searchable resource.
The Public Domain Review features articles and links highlighting particularly interesting public domain works, including photos, manuscripts, music and movies. In 2025 they just launched a new project, the The Public Domain Image Archive, where you can directly browse the images without the articles.
