Life was anything but easy growing up on Cutler Street during the early 1940s. At the time, the bustling street in Schenectady’s Mont Pleasant neighborhood was crowded with low-income and immigrant families. Poverty was common, and there was seldom time to do anything but work.
The Photography Center of the Capital District’s latest exhibit, “The Unknowns: Images from a Bygone Era,” which runs through July 26, captures one of the main reasons that executive director Nicholas Argyros opened the venue two years ago.
Quite simply, he wants to preserve not only the technological history of photography, but the images of the people who went to the trouble and expense of having their portraits taken in an era when it wasn’t just a matter of whipping out a cellphone and snapping a digital image in a matter of seconds. Posted on June 21, 2009.
This ambrotype in gilded case of a young boy in formal dress was made by Schoonmakers of 282 River St., in Troy, probably during the 1850s. It is part of “The Unknowns” exhibition at the Photography Center of the Capital District. Glass-plate negatives in these examples are courtesy of C. Lindenmuth.
This portrait is a daguerreotype made in the 1840s by John Adams Whipple in his Boston studio. It is atypical because of the profile view. Most portraits of the time were shot full face.
Caught mid-sentence, a woman sits in the grass with two companions in this late-1880s image from a glass-plate negative found in a Pennsylvania attic. With no clues about the subjects, the photographs in the exhibit are open to interpretation.
A photo of a one-horse open sleigh, from a late 1800s glass-plate negative found in a Pennsylvania attic, is unusual both because it was shot outdoors in winter and for the sharp depiction of the horse.
