FORENSIC PHOTOGRAPHY

Dating and Placing Photos

by Joelle Steele

Aside from the people in a photograph, there is often other identifying content that can help you date or place a photo. Look at the buildings and other background scenery in a photo to see if you can figure out where it was taken. If you're a family genealogist, look at all the other pictures you have and see if you can find other photos taken in the same location.

Signs & Numbers. Look for house numbers, street signs, other buildings, water towers, business signs, etc. You'll probably need to scan some photos at very high resolution (600-1200 dpi) and enlarge them onscreen in your photo editing software to examine some of these very tiny details.

Backdrops. In the earliest years of photography, portraits do not have decorative backdrops at all. The backgrounds are solid and dark owing to the long exposure times. Backdrops came into fashion in the late 1850s to early 1860s. They were individually hand-painted by local artists to be used at the studio of a particular photographer. Bigger studios had more than one backdrop from which a sitter could select for their portrait. Since most people did not travel far to have their photos taken, you are likely to find that an entire family had their photos taken in front of a particular backdrop used by their local photographer. However, people became mobile during the Civil War, World War I, and well into the 1930s with widespread use of trains for travel, so you can expect to find photos taken away from a family's home town during those times.

History. It helps to know a little about the history of people, places, and things when you examine old photos. I certainly spend an enormous amount of time in the library and researching online to learn about old cars, trains, architecture, wars, elections, cities, trades, and industries. It all comes in handy and just adds to the tools you can use when trying to figure out who's who in a photo and when it was taken.
No matter how much you research, and how sure you are about a person in a photo, you should do everything you can to verify it. This can be done by contacting local historical and genealogical societies, libraries, and museums that can confirm or refute your findings, or possibly suggest other clues in the photos or other ways to verify the content.

Hair and Clothing Styles. Another way to limit the date of a photo is to look at the styles of the clothes and hair. Clothing and hair are important because you may have a Daguerreotype portrait, but that doesn't mean the photo was taken in 1845. It could as easily have been taken in 1875 or even later, since Daguerrians were still using that process as late as the 1920s. Knowing what was in fashion at any given time during which photography was in use (1839-present) will help you determine the right decade in which your photo was taken.

Fashions in hair and clothing changed quickly though sometimes rather subtly, so you have to know what to look for in dating a photograph. It can seem time-consuming to learn about this subject matter, but remember that you are only dealing with the time period from about 1839 to the present. There are many books and Web articles about historic fashion/costumes and hair styles to help you.

However, not everyone was wearing the latest fashions when their photographs were taken. People at all socio-economic levels in the 19th and early 20th century world owned few changes of clothing. Up until about the mid-20th century, men and women hung on to their clothes for many years. They "recycled" their clothing, having the damaged areas replaced with newer parts that were less worn or more fashionable. Men, in particular, often wore their same formal dress wear and outer clothing — no matter how out of style it may have been — until it simply could not be cleaned or mended further. So, it would not be unusual to find an older man in a photo who is wearing a dressy standing collar and cravat ten years after that style had passed.

But, what you would never see is any person in a photo wearing clothing that had not yet come into fashion. Europe set the pace fashion-wise for many years, and it took awhile for fashions to make it to America. So, while a person in a portrait may be wearing outdated, out-of-style clothing, they would definitely never be wearing clothes or hair styles that came into fashion after they had died. This is very important when, for example, you know who a woman in a photo might be, and you know that the woman died in 1854, but the woman in the photo is wearing a dress with a bustle (which first debuted in 1869, was out of style by 1876, came back in style in 1883, and was out of style again in 1889). In that case, it simply cannot be a photo of the woman you think it might be.