Dated Images - an Untapped Resource

ajmorris posted this on January 18th, 2012

Old photographs only rarely have a date on them, but those that do are particularly useful. Here is an example. This photograph has a tax stamp on the back, which gives us an approximate date to begin with -- if the stamp is original, and not added later (as occasionally happens). By law, these tax stamps were required in the United States from August 1st 1864 to August 1st 1866. So just by its presence we narrow the date for the image to a two year period. The law required that photographers cancel tax stamps with their initials and the date. Unfortunately, most photographers ignored the date, and many even ignored the initials, and just used a line, X, or other mark to indicate the stamp was cancelled. In this case, the photographer did put his initials on the stamp, but for the date he just used the year, rather than an exact day. Still, that date narrows the age of the image to just seven months -- January 1st 1866 to August 1st of that year. We can be confident that the date is likely original because the image appears to have mid-1860s features, such as the wide belt with a large buckle the woman is wearing. That feature alone almost always dates between 1864 and 1867, and the rest of her outfit is also consistent with an 1866 date.

So we have a good example of typical clothing, pose and studio-props from 1866. The dated image also tells us that H C Vansyckel was operating his studio at 532 North Second Street in Philadelphia that year, and operating under the name H C Vansyckel's Photographic Sky-Light Gallery. The imprint includes a negative number: 12292, it is not unreasonable to assume, barring any contrary information, that lower numbers for this same photographer were probably earlier, and larger numbers later. The tax stamp is for two-cents, which tells us the customer paid between 10 cents and 25 cents for this CDV originally.