Young woman in Troy, NY
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I love the simple elegance of black-and-white photos, but when you stare at enough of them, you can almost forget that olden times were actually in color. Photos like this are a nice reminder. I wonder what her dress looked like in person. This little carte de visite photo was produced by Minor B. King (“Successor to G. W. and J. L. Pine”) of Troy, New York. I have another CDV from Troy, posted here. Different photographer, but the addresses indicate their studios were just a block away from each other.
Pics of Then 
This woman looks hauntingly unhappy. It reminds me of a movie I saw once, where Juliette Binoche plays a woman whose young son has died. She attends a dinner party after months of avoiding all social activities, and as I remember it, the camera shows her making a brief forced smile at the people around her and then her mouth just falling down as she goes back to her interior world of grief. Of course, nothing like that might be true for this person at all; maybe it was just a weird moment in front of a camera.
Yes, she definitely has a sort of resting sad face, or at least a sad mouth. I sometimes wonder if people in those days, when photos were rare, didn’t have the same awareness of their own appearances as we do now, or at least didn’t have the opportunity to practice composing themselves in front of a cameras like we do. Sure, there were mirrors, but I somehow understood those to be a bit rarer in those days, too.
These are good points. And I have the impression mirrors were rarer then, too; I’m not sure why I think that, but it seems like most objects were fewer.
I’m not sure where I got that idea about mirrors. I feel I read somewhere that they were rarer because they were more expensive, especially the larger ones we’re used to today. So you wouldn’t have caught glimpses of yourself in mirrors all the time like you do now. But I may be mistaken about that, or this may be a fact that pertains more to a different time period.