First of all, I have no way of knowing if the people in these photographs were actually from North Carolina. These two ambrotype photos came from an estate in Nash County, and there’s a good chance that they’ve spent the last 150 odd years not moving around much. But there’s no name on the photos, no photographer’s markings, and no family history to correlate these photos to.

But they’re still amazing miniature works of art, and they deserve mention.

Ambrotypes are one of the earliest forms of photography. A rather caustic chemical concoction was “painted” onto a glass plate, and the light-sensitive plate was loaded into a bellows camera. After the photos were taken, more caustic chemicals were used to “develop” the glass plate, and the resulting negative was carefully sandwiched between two pieces of glass to protect it. This glass sandwich was placed in a little “folder” of sorts, and if everything worked as it should the subject of the photograph was immortalized in a space smaller than the palm of my hand.

The really curious thing is that the photo isn’t quite black and white, but rather black and silver. The “white” isn’t white at all, but a smoky dull metallic color. This gives these photographs an ethereal feeling to them.

Exposure times for ambrotypes could take upwards of ten seconds; an impossibly long length of time for a person to sit perfectly still. The chairs that people sat in for these photos often had braces behind them to support the head; this is why many of these photos have a rather rigid and uptight feeling about them. They were rigid and uptight!

I have no way of knowing if the subjects in these two photos are related or not. The cases that the photos are housed in are similar only in their outside dimensions; even the way the glass plates are mounted differ between the two photos. They were likely taken in the 1850′s — the heyday of the ambrotype — which means the older gentleman could easily have been born in the 1700′s. Regardless, they’re some of the only extent glimpses of our antebellum ancestors, with a presence that only an original photograph can convey.

And if you’re wondering why the photos of these photos aren’t all that great, it’s because ambrotypes are virtually impossible to duplicate. It took a half an hour of creative fiddling just to get photos that were legible.