Children in chairs
By: usermattw
Tags: antiques, CDV, New Orleans, photography, Pontiac, vintage photography
Category: Children
Click here to view it larger.
I couldn’t decide which of these little cartes de visite to post, so I decided to just post them all. It’s always interesting to compare and contrast. I think we’ve got two boys (upper left and lower right) and two girls. I think the boy pictures are the oldest. The two kids on the left look the least comfortable, and the expression on the boy in the upper left is downright alarming. (I think the pupils of his eyes may have been touched up, inadvertently contributing to his glare.) The variety of chairs is interesting, and I love examining the details of all their outfits. The boy pictures come with no information. The girl in the lower left appears to be named Arneta May Ebner (if the name written on the back is indeed hers), and the photographer is J. H. Benson of Mammoth Gallery in Pontiac, Michigan. The photographer of the upper right photo is W. W. Washburn of New Orleans.
Here is the back of the lower left photo (click to enlarge):
And here is the back of the upper right photo (click to enlarge):
Pics of Then 
I can’t help but compare them (favorably) to those billboards for Apple photo portraits that currently are near the Bay Bridge. https://www.adweek.com/creativity/apple-babies-shot-on-iphone-ads/
Ha! Funny, I hadn’t seen those.
Poor Arneta looks really concerned! Interesting how Benson set up the shot so that the chair filled the frame. Maybe she was scared because the camera was pretty close, and she didn’t know what it was going to do.
Right? Poor thing. At first her posture mad me wonder if some effort was made to secure her in place, like some sort of hidden seat belt or something, though I think it’s probably just the result of her desire to escape. And you’re right, it’s easy to forget how novel the process of photography might have been to a child back then, the strange man operating a lumbering contraption pointed at you, possibly with an alarming flash. Hopefully she was able to chuckle about it later.