Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 91, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 April 1910 — HAVING "PHOTO" TAKEN [ARTICLE]

HAVING "PHOTO" TAKEN

Motives of Vanity That Push Many People, Mostly Women, Through the Ordeal. WEARY ROUND OF STUDIOS. "H Barbarous Methods Employed by the Photographer Which Should Be Abolished. It is extraordinary that women more often than men submit themselves Into the hands of professional photographers, says an exchange. It is extraordinary for the reason that personal appearance Is to women a matter of far greater Importance than it is to men. The shock felt by a man when he sees what » photographer has made of him Is far less acute than the shock a woman feels In like case. But why, even so, should he ever let the photographer make anything of him at all? There is no charm in the actual process of being photographed. Your heart does not throb with rapture when you are conducted into'that little anteroom and left there to consult the mirror and see, whether your hair and your necktie be not disordered. Your instinct is to make a dash for freedom. Too late! You find yourself led into the studio, where the air is thick partly with the gloom and the h*eart flutterlngs of ycjur predecessors, and partly with the amiable efforts of the photographer to put you at your ease. With the air of desperate nonchalance you subside on the carven chair which he indicates. You are told that your attitude is “perfect;” you must be taken “just as you are.” For a moment you feel that you have • been rather clever; but “chin a little mqre up,” and various other injunctions, enforced by gentle prods and tugs which you have* not the spirit to resent; and, just when you have conjured a little animation into your face, the back of your head is firmly enclipped in an instrument kept for that purpose; and so you remain, trying not to blink, and with all youth and hope withered within you, while the photographer counts the seconds of your ordeal. The only photographs that are tolerable are the photographs of people one has never seen. Over the old albums I can pore with delight. I like those “cartes-de-vislte" in which not yet had photography slipped the grand manner of Sir Thomas Lawrence. T like the marble column and the looped curtain of velvet and the balustrade and the bosky park behind this or that whiskered and peg-top-trousered gentleman who holds firmly in his hand a scroll of paper. I like, too, this and that lady leaning across a rustic stile, with the forefinger of one hand pressed pensively to her cheek. As a record of costume photographs are admirable and amusing. As a record of what the wearers of those costumes really look like, they are quite negligible. It would be great good fun to have albums even older than those of which I have spoken. But if all the illustrious figures in history had been photographed the mystery that is a part of their charm would not be violated. T should like to see the cartes-de-Visite of Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Nell Gwynne, Socrates, Valasquez, Joan of Arc, Julius Caesar and so on. But I should not then be one whit the wiser as to the actual semblance of these folk. t