The adventures and various works of a photographer, road tripper, former patron of the local arts, aspiring app developer, and late night coffee drinker and conversationalist.
I like to collect vintage photos, particularly vintage photos of my hometown of Dallas and photos of places I've visited. Most of these date from the era of affordable personal photography and include mostly slides, real photo postcards, and everyday prints with the occasional vintage film negative thrown in. But a handful of items in my collection date to a period even earlier than that. These are not photo reproductions or reprints, period postcards, or facsimiles, but are actual period specimens that hail from the nineteenth or extreme early twentieth centuries. Here are examples of some of these.
Daguerreotype of young lady, 1/6 plate, circa 1840s
This portrait of a young lady is said to date to sometime during the 1840s, making it the oldest photo in my collection as of this writing. The ringlets in the woman's hair are a particular draw for me stylistically, and, unlike most photos from this period, you can see a bit of a smile playing upon her lips. Daguerreotypes consist of sheets of silver-plated copper, very highly polished and chemically treated to be light-sensitive. The image consists of the same silver as the surface upon which it sits, meaning that the appearance of the photo alternates between a positive and negative image depending on how the available light hits it. Daguerreotypes are very fragile objects and are usually presented behind glass-plated frames, which are stored inside latched, decorative cases. Mine came without a case, but I immediately placed it into one upon receipt.
Unfortunately, I have no information on the location, the photographer, or the identity of the woman in the photo. What I can say is that having one daguerreotype makes me want to have another. This was purchased from an online seller in mid-January 2025.
Updated October 9, 2024 with additional historical information
Whenever I shop antique stores, estate sales, or online, I'm always on the lookout for unique and original snapshots and slides. If it's a photo of somewhere I've been, or of a scene or situation I find interesting enough, then it's fair game as long as the price is right. And when it comes to places I've been, few vintage images are more interesting than those of my own hometown and surrounding areas. Here are sixty-nine rare images of DFW spanning every decade of the 20th century, all taken from my personal collection.
Houston Street Viaduct, 1945
The Houston Street Viaduct (originally known as the Dallas-Oak Cliff Viaduct) was constructed in 1911 to connect Downtown Dallas with the then recently annexed community and former independent city of Oak Cliff. It was built to replace earlier connections that were destroyed by the Great Trinity River Flood of 1908. The originally planned streetcar line that was intended to traverse the bridge was finally constructed more than one hundred years later, entering service in April 2015.
Heading into Downtown Dallas via the Houston Street Viaduct, 1945 (view from car)
Continue reading "DFW in vintage photos"
Collecting vintage and antique photos is a pastime of mine. Most of my collection is acquired from antique shops and antique malls, estate sales, and from online purchases. On occasion, I post collections of these photos on this blog. This is a home page for these collected posts, and it will be updated as new collections are added.
Here is another collection of vintage photo snapshots and slides, depicting (mostly) locations I have visited during various road trips across the U.S. and Canada. As before, these are mostly paired with my own photos of the same or similar locations.
Entering Idaho
Idaho was one of the last states I visited in the Lower 48, mostly because its location is not en route to any destination I've ever been interested in visiting. In 2021, I made the 110 mile drive north from South Jordan, Utah in order to set foot in the state and finally cross it off my list. I was struck by how much the Idaho welcome sign on Interstate 15 reminded me of the old Yahoo! logos. As shown in the top photo, the state once made use of a more traditional (but less eye-catching) style of design.
Entering Idaho, unknown date
Continue reading "More vintage photo snapshots"
During the latter 1980s, while the punk scene was maturing on the east side of the DFW Metroplex, a similarly loud, aggressive music scene was developing in parallel to it over on the west side. Dallas had its iconic, punk focused venues such as the Honest Place, the Hot Klub, Studio D, and the succession of venues to call 2111 Commerce Street home. Likewise, Fort Worth and environs had their own metal focused clubs such as Rascals, the Tombstone Factory, and Joe's Garage. These two scenes didn't exist in a vacuum, of course, and there was plenty of crossover between them (the Silver Dollar Rock Shop was located in Dallas, for example, and Fort Worth-based Rigor Mortis was famously managed and guided to a record deal by Jeff Liles, who once booked shows for the Theatre Gallery in Deep Ellum). But, musically and spiritually speaking, the early DFW metal scene was based mostly on the west side of town. The aforementioned Rascals, Tombstone Factory, and Joe's Garage will be subjects of future installments in this series, but sprinkled among these iconic venues were a number of smaller, less remembered haunts that also called the areas west of Dallas home. What were some of these, and what (if anything) remains of them today? In this installment of "Ghosts of DFW Music History," we'll take a look at four of them.
