MOUNT VERNON — Once a month, we feature a pair of vintage cabinet card photographs taken in Knox County which do not have names identifying the people in the pictures. They were all taken by photographers who had studios in Mount Vernon.
Cabinet cards were a popular format for sharing photos in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
This month’s we feature two more photos from the Star & Crescent Art Gallery. While several of the cabinet cards we are examining in this series were produced by this gallery, they appear to only have been in business a short period of time in the late 1800s. Other cabinet cards from this photographer list a business address of 137 South Main St. in Mount Vernon, but both of this week’s cards give the address as 102 Gambier Street, Mount Vernon, which suggests that the photographer moved his studio at some point.
Photo #7 shows an inquisitive young woman with dark hair and glasses wearing a striped dress. Only a small portion of the backdrop can be seen behind her, as it is a closer portrait than some of these others we’ve seen from this studio. The gallery name is embossed at the bottom of the cabinet card. The back of the card is plain.
Photo #8 is of a somewhat older woman of quietly authoritative bearing. She wears a dark dress with a high collar. As in Photo #7, this is a portrait shot, and the backdrop is barely visible. It looks like it might be the same background in both portraits, perhaps suggesting the two photos were taken around the same time.
The two pictures seem to be more accomplished than the pair featured last month. We’ll examine more photos from this studio as the series continues, but based on what we’ve seen so far, perhaps the photographer started overambitiously at the Main Street address—taken over from a previous studio — but spent too much on fancy, printed cabinet card stock for photographs that weren’t all that good, technically speaking.
Perhaps he moved around the corner to a slightly lower-rent location and improved his skills, though by that point it was already too late for his business, which doesn’t seem to have survived more than a few years. Perhaps we’ll eventually turn up more information about this mysterious photographer.
No one was able to identify last month’s mystery photos. Please share this column far and wide so we can try to ID these photos. If you have any leads on who these people might be, contact me here at Knox Pages. I’ll report back next month on any progress naming these folks, and bring forth two more cards.
