Knickerbocker Photo (Update)

[SteveS]

prewarsports, thank you for your opinions, which are appreciated and definitely worth more than two cents. It's my understanding that stereoviews from the 1860s-1870s are on colored cards with rounded corners, and usually have the photographer's/distributor's information on them. The earlier ones are white or cream-colored with squared corners and no info. As for the ages of the men, after sharpening the image and looking at each one very closely in comparison with the known photos, every facial feature is a very close match. At first I thought that the man I identify as De Bost was much older and someone else wearing glasses. But a close look shows that he is not wearing glasses and appears to be older because his eyes are mostly shut and the blur of the stereoview makes it appear that he has bags under his eyes. For what it's worth, I ran them all through two different facial-match programs and all the results showed very high positive match rates of 84%-97%. As I say, I am not sure whether the photo is an earlier one that was used to make a stereoview. In any event, thanks again, and happy collecting!

[vthobby]

Steve,

I have no idea if your item is what you say it is but kudos for you man.

Love your passion and your rebuttals. No ill will amongst anyone but way to keep it clean and to do your research. Stick to your guns!

Love your research and quick responses! Logical and from something that is approx 150 years old. Who knows?

Thanks for sharing this. Really neat to research and think about!

Peace, Mike

[prewarsports]

There is no set colors for years on stereoviews. Many of the earliest ones are on larger cabinet backs and have orange and yellow mounts, these are generally from the 1870's. The earlier ones are actually smaller and have rectangular photo portions, you can find those with valuable Civil War scenes etc. In reality, the Civil War is what really made these popular as they were a novelty until war-scenes became the cool thing to have around the house to show your friends. In general, stereoviews were not widely distributed or used until the 1870's and are rare before then with exception of mass-produced civil war images etc.

[SteveS]

Mike, thank you very much! I appreciate views both pro and con, and that's the reason I posted it here, as you guys are the best and most knowledgeable.
prewarsports, I think the wild card here is the Anthony Brothers. They began their stereoview business in 1857, and had deep ties to the Knickerbockers. I can totally see Edward Anthony, who had traveled to England in 1847 and learned photography from one of its inventors, making a photograph of this team as one of his first stereoviews. Also, I have seen numerous stereoviews that were verified to be from the 1850s and have a style identical to this one (including the photo shape). What I need to do eventually is have the original photo inspected by photo and facial-match experts. Even after that, I assume there will be people who agree or disagree. For me, after spending a lot of time trying to convince myself otherwise, I don't see any way that there can be six guys who look so incredibly like the comparison photos and not be them.

[prewarsports]

Best of luck in your endeaver

Look at the known 1862 photograph of the Knickerbockers, which I am very familiar with, the men are all relatively consistent in age and are all middle-aged men about 45-60 years old at the time.

It is going to be tough to explain why some of the Knickerbockers in your photo have people who look like they started shaving the previous week and some of them look like they could be the other one's grandfather.

The kid looking down, not sure who that is in your ID list, is clearly very young, perhaps 25 years old at the latest. Yet in the 1862 photograph which you use as a comparison (which is older than yours), he looks like he is 60 years old. That would eliminate him as a potential Knickerbocker immediately.

Your photo is 100% more recent than the 1862 known Knickerbocker photograph. The clothing and facial hair combined with photography method and presentation place this to c. 1870-1875, everyone in the 1862 photograph would be ten years older at least, but some have miraculously become 25-30 years old again.

A few of the other men in that photo are clearly very old, perhaps 60-70 years old. Comparing their birthdays and relative ages to one another and then seeing that those relative ages do not match well in this particular photo is an obstacle that will likely be impossible to explain without time travel.

I wish you no ill will and will gladly rescind everything I have said if it is proven incorrect, but I think with some objective thinking about the ages of the men in their totality and not individual facial analysis without context to the age of the image and the ages the men are supposed to be in that image, will be tough to explain.

Again, cool photo and interesting discussion and I wish you all the best in your continued research.

[SteveS]

prewarsports, while I disagree respectfully with your date on the stereoview, I totally understand your questions about the ages. I am also very familiar with the 1862 photo, which has been used for most of the comparisons here. Initially it frustrated me, as I couldn't reconcile my IDs with some of the men's sizes. However, I then discovered that the 1862 photo is an artist-enhanced composite. It's unclear if any of them were even in the same room together, but the photographer took separate pictures and assembled them using a cut-and-paste method, and then used a marking device to fill in the details that became obscured during that process and the enlargement. This is most evident in Charles De Bost. He looks like The Hulk in the 1862 photo, and makes Doc Adams look like a tiny ant. But in the 1859 picture, he is standing next to Doc and Doc is actually a bit taller. The man looking down, whom I ID as Fraley Niebuhr, was also a bit frustrating. My initial inclination was that he is Harry Wright, who joined the Knicks in 1857 at age 22. He was about 30 years younger than the other men, which would fit pretty well. He also does resemble Harry at that age, and I can't rule it out. But when I do the face-to-face comparisons, he matches up extremely well with Niebuhr (who was younger than the others by about seven years). Finally, regardless of the age of the stereoview, I suspect that the photo was taken earlier and the stereoview was made by taking a picture of it or using its negative. But once again, thank you for your contributions, which I definitely take into account, and I will continue to research it.

[Leon]

Here is one and I suspect the date is correct. I will try to get a few earlier ones out in the next day or so. I believe I have some from the 1860s....

[SteveS]

Very cool pic, Leon. Also, see what I was saying about the orange color and rounded corners being from a later date? Here are a few of mine from the 1860s.

[prewarsports]

I want to walk away from this debate very badly. Once passion enters an objective assessment, you can no longer have a rational discussion. You are passionate about wanting this to be a Knickerbocker photo badly, which I get, but it is clouding your rational assessment of the history of photography which is pretty easy considering how fast the genre changed between the 1850's-1870's. It really is not that hard to date the "approximate" age of photographs as a result.

I have handled perhaps as much as half a million stereoview cards since I started collecting photography and am not a novice. Online research is one thing, handling these things consistently over years and years (more than 30 years), you start to learn things that hold true over time. I've also handled as many or more 1860's-1880's albumen prints on CDV cards etc. Here are some useful facts for you.

Fact 1: The stereoview "viewer" was not really invented until 1859. Before that date, these things were mostly daguerreotypes and ambrotypes that had to be developed and then another one shot and redeveloped at a slightly different angle and then viewed through cumbersome devices hand made one at a time. These were done as novelties and nobody owned them aside from businesses and the ultra wealthy. Paper stereoview cards may have been "invented" in 1859 as well (nobody knows for sure) but that literally means nothing. CDV and albumen technology was in its absolute infancy by the start of the Civil War. You essentially do not find albumen prints before 1862 and yours is 100% albumen. Your photo was done after the famous 1862 salt print, well after actually.

Fact 2: The oval top cut on your stereoview was not in vogue until the late 1860's and 1870's. Do a quick Google search for Civil War dated stereoviews or other images concretely dated to have been MADE in the early-mid 1860's. All have square cuts. The ones that do not were done after the Civil War as commemorative issues which were popular throughout the 19th century. I have never seen a pre-Civil War era stereoview with the larger oval cut at the top, if you find one, it was almost certainly made in the late 1860's at the earliest using an older image. This was a "style" of photography and it did not become popular until after the Civil War.

Fact 3: Absent Civil War scenes where photographers like Matthew Brady and a few others operated completely out of wagons with all their equipment including darkrooms available to them, outdoor photography was almost impossible in the 1860's and basically did not exist in the 1850's. It was an expensive and cumbersome process until the 1870's. There are almost no known outdoor albumen photographs because the lighting was tricky, the camera weighed a ton, the exposure time was ridiculous and things like clouds and wind could not be controlled and would destroy portrait shots. It was many, many times easier to produce an image in a studio so you find 99.9%+++ of all portraits and groups taken inside, until the technology got better in the 1870's.

I would bet money that if you took the "Knickerbocker" angle away and just approached 100 antique photography experts about the approximate age of your image based on style, dress, outdoor setting, oval top stereoview style etc., you will get all 100 answering that the image is c. 1870-1876. I can not imagine a scenario where a single one would estimate Civil War era and you would be laughed out of the room if you suggested 1850's because it is impossible.

Others can debate the facial accuracy, I am just going off photography style here since you said you "disagree" with my dating which I will stand behind with extensive experience.

Now I think I can walk away and wish you the best of luck on your research project. If you still question the dating, you will be fighting a VERY uphill battle but I wish you well. Take care.