Knickerbocker Photo (Update)

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by prewarsports

I have been doing photography for a very long time and could write paragraphs about stereoview photography and it's evolution but suffice it to say you have a c. 1870 stereoview on your hands with it actually in my opinion most likely dating to about 1872-75...

Originally Posted by prewarsports

Your photo is 100% more recent than the 1862 known Knickerbocker photograph. The clothing and facial hair combined with photography method and presentation place this to c. 1870-1875...

Originally Posted by prewarsports

I want to walk away from this debate very badly. Once passion enters an objective assessment, you can no longer have a rational discussion. You are passionate about wanting this to be a Knickerbocker photo badly, which I get, but it is clouding your rational assessment of the history of photography which is pretty easy considering how fast the genre changed between the 1850's-1870's. It really is not that hard to date the "approximate" age of photographs as a result.

I have handled perhaps as much as half a million stereoview cards since I started collecting photography and am not a novice. Online research is one thing, handling these things consistently over years and years (more than 30 years), you start to learn things that hold true over time. I've also handled as many or more 1860's-1880's albumen prints on CDV cards etc. Here are some useful facts for you.

Fact 1: The stereoview "viewer" was not really invented until 1859. Before that date, these things were mostly daguerreotypes and ambrotypes that had to be developed and then another one shot and redeveloped at a slightly different angle and then viewed through cumbersome devices hand made one at a time. These were done as novelties and nobody owned them aside from businesses and the ultra wealthy. Paper stereoview cards may have been "invented" in 1859 as well (nobody knows for sure) but that literally means nothing. CDV and albumen technology was in its absolute infancy by the start of the Civil War. You essentially do not find albumen prints before 1862 and yours is 100% albumen. Your photo was done after the famous 1862 salt print, well after actually.

Fact 2: The oval top cut on your stereoview was not in vogue until the late 1860's and 1870's. Do a quick Google search for Civil War dated stereoviews or other images concretely dated to have been MADE in the early-mid 1860's. All have square cuts. The ones that do not were done after the Civil War as commemorative issues which were popular throughout the 19th century. I have never seen a pre-Civil War era stereoview with the larger oval cut at the top, if you find one, it was almost certainly made in the late 1860's at the earliest using an older image. This was a "style" of photography and it did not become popular until after the Civil War.

Fact 3: Absent Civil War scenes where photographers like Matthew Brady and a few others operated completely out of wagons with all their equipment including darkrooms available to them, outdoor photography was almost impossible in the 1860's and basically did not exist in the 1850's. It was an expensive and cumbersome process until the 1870's. There are almost no known outdoor albumen photographs because the lighting was tricky, the camera weighed a ton, the exposure time was ridiculous and things like clouds and wind could not be controlled and would destroy portrait shots. It was many, many times easier to produce an image in a studio so you find 99.9%+++ of all portraits and groups taken inside, until the technology got better in the 1870's.

I would bet money that if you took the "Knickerbocker" angle away and just approached 100 antique photography experts about the approximate age of your image based on style, dress, outdoor setting, oval top stereoview style etc., you will get all 100 answering that the image is c. 1870-1876. I can not imagine a scenario where a single one would estimate Civil War era and you would be laughed out of the room if you suggested 1850's because it is impossible.

Others can debate the facial accuracy, I am just going off photography style here since you said you "disagree" with my dating which I will stand behind with extensive experience.

Now I think I can walk away and wish you the best of luck on your research project. If you still question the dating, you will be fighting a VERY uphill battle but I wish you well. Take care.

Experts can be wrong sometimes, but never THIS wrong. It would be one thing if prewarsports had said something along the lines of, "I believe this is most likely from the 1870s because of x, y, and z. Earlier dates are possible, though very unlikely." But it's something else entirely to go off on a multi post rant like this, babbling on about how much of an expert you are, having handled over a million similar prints by hand, and saying that there is no possibility whatsoever of it dating to the 1850s and that 100 out of 100 experts would unanimously agree that this would date to the 1870s.

Oops.

Prewarsports, any comment on the above agreement from from 4 actual experts all dating this to the 1850s? When I'm this wrong, I follow it up with an apology and accept it as a learning opportunity and adjust my understanding accordingly going forward.