Backgrounds and Furniture in Photos

In the last month or so, I’ve met (via e-mail) a lot of people who collect specific types of pictures or who know a lot about a photographic detail. I even corresponded with someone who collects photographers’ fingerprints on daguerreotypes. Now that’s a identification database I’d like to have!

Over the last couple of decades, many books on photo history have been published. I’ve collected quite a library on clothing, forensic analysis techniques used by the CIA, furniture, postcards and military costumes (to name a few).

You’d be surprised by what I’ve got on my shelves, but there are still a couple of titles I’d like to see published.

• Photographic backgrounds—I’ve only found one short article on backdrops, and it doesn’t begin to cover the topic. If you own a picture with an interesting background, send it to me and see it featured here.

• Furniture in photos—I use furniture-history tomes when looking at the tables and chairs featured in photos, but as far as I know, no one has published anything on that topic. In addition to clothing and the photographer’s imprint, furniture can place a picture in a time frame. Think wicker in the 1890s and fringed chairs in the 1860s.

Send me your photos with interesting backgrounds and furniture, and let’s build a database of reader photos and create our own online reference tool for these two understudied bits of photo history.