Thursday 13 January 2011

Old photos

(More antique than vintage this time, but I don't want to scatter the tags all over the place.)

I got inspired by Stephanie Ann's post about preserving old photos and went photo-hunting again. And I got some pretty, really old photos really cheap! (Most of them were 20 CZK, that's about one US dollar at this time.)

Thanks to Stephanie's post, I know these all are "Carte de Visite". They're all approximately the same size, although they were all taken by different photographers, in different times, and probably also by a bit different techniques (the last photo at least).

If you click on the photos, you should get HUGE versions of them. I want to give you (and myself!) as many details as possible.

This one is probably the oldest - the style of the dress is - 1860s?


She looks a bit prim, but she has a pretty dress - I love the trim, and the waist detail.

This young lady/girl is probably also from the 1860s?

Unlike the others, she was photographed outdoors. Also unlike the others, this photo has no markings. Notice the girl is most probably wearing her hair in a snood under that hat! And, again, look at the trim. Aww.

This one is, I guess, circa 1867-1870:

Look at that trim again! The buttons! And the hairstyle. Quite a curious hairstyle, now that I see it big.

And c. 1880 - I guess: the wide sleeves and the narrow skirt...

Another lady with a parasol! Unless it's an umbrella. She has quite an elaborate dress and headdress! A wreath thing and a veil. And, wow, she seems to have short hair!
(Iglau is nowadays called Jihlava. They have a beautiful zoo, among other things.)

And I'm not sure about this one - it's clearly the newest - it's glossy, and the writings on the back are in Czech, not German or German/Czech as the previous ones. Also notice the Czech names are written with diacritics, not in the German way like the Doleschal/Doležal above.

I bought this one because I really liked the lady... she feels like someone I would have known, so to say. I also like the way she dressed. A good, simple coat and a bit of whimsiness with the lacy shawl and the headdress. Yup. I like her.

If you have any ideas as to the dates, tell me!

I was very successful today on the vintage front - I also bought a c. 1950 knitting magazine. Complete with the patterns and one single knitting pattern (a cute cap) inside for a good measure. 45 CZK. I'll show you in another post.

It really makes me happy. Reading all about the vintage patterns and pattern magazines on foreign blogs, I was feeling a bit sad - not just that I didn't have any - that's my own problem, after all - but that I didn't know of so many pretty vintage patterns in my country. Feeling that the 40 years of communism had stripped my country of something quite precious. Well, it seems that process took some time and early on, there were still people from the old times in the "business" and took good care of it. :-)

10 comments:

  1. And thank you soooo much for putting up the bigger versions - it's great to have these resources.

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  2. You're welcome! I know I love these resources myself, so of course I shared. :-) Here I hopefully don't have to fear copyright laws or anything of that sort. :-)

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  3. They are really nice. I do love that lace scarf too. That first dress it so pretty, the shape reminds me a bit of the Simplicity pattern 2960. I never liked the dress from the pattern it doesn't look like it fits the model and the colors were really kind of bizarre. Now that I see a similar dress on a real person, it is very lovely.

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  4. Hm, that Simplicity dress really is bizarre! It looks as if it were bigger than the model and stuffed to "fit" her! :D

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  5. Oh your finds are fabulous! Love looking at fashion through ages and trying to recreate the era in words and stories (and maybe in clothing?). I am so into vintage photographs at the time being! I dug out my grandma's photos of her childhood and am preparing a special post about it!
    P.S. Thank you for the lovely comment on my umbrella!

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  6. These are looking so fine..waoo...pretty nice..
    Thanks for your sweet comment at my blog..so sweet...

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  7. You're welcome. :-) I like many of the things you've made... what I've seen so far.

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  8. Wow, these are great, I love these photos, and looking at old dresses and clothing... I´m looking forward to your UPM photos of the wedding dresses! I´ve been to this exhibition too, but didn´t take photos (and I didn´t know it´s even possible to take photos there...).

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  9. You have to buy a special "photographing ticket" for photographing in UPM. I made use of their free entrance on Tuesday evenings and bought only the photographing ticket. :-)

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