CDV Portrait with Dressing Instructions. Probably 1870s.

Posted here is a fair-to-poor quality CDV by a photographer based in Owatanna, Minnesota. The image is undated but could be 1870s. And technically it’s not very good: The exposure and contrast range are mediocre. So … why am I posting this? After all, I have much better images in my collection.

What’s important is printed on the back of the CDV. Unlike photographers that usually added pithy graphics on the backside of their CDVs and cabinet cards, this is the only CDV I’ve owned instructing potential customers how to dress for pictures. It is because early photographic chemistry did not render colors correctly and clothing could look odd.

Early chemistry was sensitive to higher spectrum colors such as blue. This meant that blues ended up white in prints and tintypes. Reds, on the other hand, appeared nearly black in pictures. This is also why many early landscapes show blank skies because blues washed out. Photographers figured out retouching methods to reproduce clouds, but in studios it was difficult and not economical to retouch clothing.

I don’t have background information on Will Thomas, but it was a clever idea to add information about how to dress.