Help me interpret this old photograph (NYC, 1910s or 1920s)
April 17, 2022 4:10 AM   Subscribe

I found these vintage postcards (SL Twitter thread) in a London junk shop the other day. The one I'm particularly interested in here is the one showing three people posing in a car. The card was produced by Royal Photo Studio, 433 Sixth Avenue, NYC, and clearly taken against a painted studio backdrop. I'm trying to understand why this photo would have been taken and what use the customer had in mind for it.

Two theories so far:

1) My own initial interpretation was that it may have been taken at a time when cars were enough of a novelty for people to think it would be a bit of a lark to have their photo taken in one. If anyone out there recognises the precise model of the car, perhaps that would allow us to date the photograph?

2) A friend believes turn-of-the-century immigrants in NYC sometimes had what he calls "fake prosperity" photographs taken, which they'd then send back home to show relatives how well they were doing in the new world. If that's the answer, it would explain why the figure in the front passenger seat is dressed to look like the driver's valet. Could he be a studio "prop" too?
posted by Paul Slade to Society & Culture (13 answers total)
 
I don’t recognize the brand of that car, but Ford Model Ts were usually left hand drives, though right hand drives such as that car were produced in small numbers.
posted by jamjam at 4:32 AM on April 17, 2022


I'm pretty sure that they just wanted to look richer than they were, but that wasn't limited to recent immigrants. I have a bunch of old studio photos of family from that era and the backdrops are always pretty grand looking, with props like fancy chairs (or in one case from the late 1800s, a bicycle). These relatives of mine were in the U.S. but the family had immigrated from England in the early 1600s. This type of status-y studio photo was common in Europe as well. Here's a fake first-class train car in an Edinburgh studio.
posted by pinochiette at 4:53 AM on April 17, 2022 [6 favorites]






I think there could be a high degree of overlap between 1 and 2; I would tend towards 1. There’s a photograph taken of me when I was 9 months old, sitting on a pony in our front yard, dressed in a cowboy outfit. It was taken in 1955. I sometimes have to explain to much younger folks that there was a photographer who would bring a pony out to your house and take photographs; we didn’t own a pony.
posted by coldhotel at 5:55 AM on April 17, 2022 [8 favorites]


I am not a car expert but that car is definitely not a two-seater!

I feel like this is all very much in line with the history of personal photography - we're always trying to make ourselves look cooler than we actually are in photos. Not much different than going to particularly instagrammable restaurants and taking selfies of your feet on a mosaic entryway!
posted by mskyle at 6:01 AM on April 17, 2022 [4 favorites]


This photo reminds me a lot of a photo my family had taken in an old-fashioned car at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in the 1960s. Photography has a long history of taking pictures of people that have nothing to do with their real-life circumstances. Probably the most well known are all of those pictures of people with their heads showing in cut-outs of cartoons. I was going to say my family photo in the car would be better dated by our clothes, but even recently, I've seen photographers at fairs with selections of old-fashioned clothes for people who want their pictures taken. (A fashion history expert viewing those photos would notice if the clothes were from slightly different time periods, but most people wouldn't.)

I'm not sure we can know what that car signifies even if we knew the date it was manufactured. Is it supposed to be visibly new or fancy or old or even comic in some way? Is there a joke the recipient would immediately get? Or is it meant to imply wealth? It would be really hard to parse those things out based on the car alone.
posted by FencingGal at 6:55 AM on April 17, 2022 [2 favorites]


search eBay: rppc people in prop car

rppc = real photo postcard
posted by cda at 7:15 AM on April 17, 2022 [3 favorites]




It's somewhat analogous to modern Instagram filters and the like. New technology! Let's use it in somewhat unrealistic ways to depict ourselves!
posted by praemunire at 9:11 AM on April 17, 2022 [1 favorite]


(Or, you could ask, did every single child who went to an urban public school in the 70s/80s belong to a family that owned a wicker chair with a "peacock" back? Or were they all secretly Black Panthers? It turns out, no.)
posted by praemunire at 9:14 AM on April 17, 2022


I am going to guess that photo would go right alongside the black and white picture of my mother, my brother, and me dressed in Old West clothing. It's a gag picture. "Look at us, we're in a horseless carriage!"
posted by Stuka at 2:55 PM on April 17, 2022


Response by poster: Thanks, everyone - I learned a lot.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:16 AM on May 1, 2022


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