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.
Dallas is home to a healthy community of photographers and photography studios in the digital era. While the widespread prevalence of easy, convenient cameras in everyone's mobile device makes everyday photography easier than ever, there is still a niche carved out for professional work when it comes to memorializing important events or, just as importantly, people. This was no less the case in the earlier days of photography, in the days before Kodak and the Brownie camera made picture taking easily accessible to the masses. The portrait studios that operated in the late nineteenth century captured images on plates of glass and produced printed vanity photos, or "cabinet cards," by the dozen for those seeking to memorialize their own likenesses, or those of their family members or families. But while these studios helped create a valuable record of many early communities, their own legacies have so often been erased by over a century of urban development, with little to no evidence left to recall their one-time locations near city centers. In this post, we're going to go on a sort of "walking tour" of several such locations in the city of Dallas, and take a look at the stories behind seven early Dallas photography studios.
The tour area
I purchased this vintage photo from an online auction. The expression on this young lady's face is a bit inscrutable. Is she sassily hamming it up for the camera? Or is she about to eat the photographer? Her scary disposition makes this vintage photo a fun pick for this year's Halloween.
This series of images presents a view of one portion of downtown Elm Street over a period of approximately 11 decades. The view is facing east in the general area of present-day Akard Street.
This first postcard, published by S.H. Kress & Co. around the early 1910s, shows Elm Street as it would have appeared circa 1911/1912. Kress was a five and dime chain of stores that once dotted the country, known for its distinctive architectural designs and, later, for its segregationist company policies. According to contemporary newspaper articles, the Kress store shown in the postcard was commissioned and built in 1911 for a cost of $38,000 (around $1.2 million in 2024 dollars). The Wilson Building, seen behind the W.A. Green & Company building, housed the Titche-Goettinger Department Store until the end of the 1920s. The vantage point of the artist is Scollard Court, or present-day Exchange Place, renamed to the latter following the 1916 construction of the Exchange National Bank. Today Exchange Place is little more than a narrow, alley-like walkway sandwiched between the one-time Exchange bank building and that of its rival Republic National Bank, long since christened "Money Alley" and designated as a historical landmark. Note the streetcar lines running down the center of Elm Street.
