[Photo Album]: Early Snapshots including Sporting

New Jersey, 1899. Hardcover. Near Fine. Oblong quarto. Pebbled cloth with leather corners and spine with "photographs" stamped in guilt on the front board measuring 11.5" x 9". A collection of 201 sepia toned, and 2 cynotype photographs, most measuring 3.5" x 4", affixed to stiff cream paper with captions. The album is good only with spotting, tears, and lacking the leather on the spine; the pictures are about near fine with some edgewear. A vernacular photo album from the Plainfield Ward of Union, New Jersey and the surrounding suburbs from 1899, kept by Dewitt Hubbell, a Massachusett-born banker at the Plainfield Savings Bank. The album depicts Victorian Americans in a variety of posed pictures along with candids using the new technology of the "snapshot" around New jersey including Union and Montclair. The collection combines around the home photographs of smiling families, various dogs and cats, and trips around the tri-state area. Roughly 29 photos were taken during various hunting trips, including one during Labor Day weekend 1900 at Scituate Beach, Massachusetts depicting the setting up of blinds and men shooting birds. "Snapshot" photography, defined as " a photograph that is "shot" spontaneously and quickly, most often without artistic or journalistic intent," is said to have started around 1888 with the Kodak No. 1 camera, and was cemented as a pastime with the introduction of the Brownie Box Camera in 1900. This collection dates to around 1899, predating the Brownie and is an extensive and very early assemblage of vernacular snapshot photography, with pleasing images evoking the potential of the new technology.