“American Group Portrait,” ca. 1910, unknown location and photographer, via Museum of Photographic Arts Commons on flickr.
I suspect that this is the (semi-circular) porch of a boarding house and that the people are the residents and owners/employees.
Click on the image to enlarge it.
Happy 2018 to you all!
“Lady in White,” ca. 1905, by Dwight A. Davis, via Museum of Photographic Arts Commons on flickr.
That’s a cat at the bottom of the steps.
“Sunday Afternoon on Kolín Island,” Czech Republic, 1922, by Joseph Sudek, via Museum of Photographic Arts Commons on flickr.
Elizabeth and Marilyn Watson, probably in the Berkeley, California, area, 1921, by Dorothea Lange, via Museum of Photographic Arts Commons on flickr (all photos here).
Above, Marilyn Watson; in both photos, the sisters seem to be under a grape arbor. Below, they are with their mother, May V. Landis Watson, still outdoors, I believe.
In 1921, Lange was 26 years old and running her own portrait studio in Berkeley. She had many well-to-do clients, as the Watsons appear to be. Ten years later, she would begin the work that made her famous: capturing the faces of the Great Depression and of the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans.
There’s a little clip from a PBS documentary on Lange here. It shows a number of her early photographs.
“Lady Elisabeth’s Rose Garden, Lacock [Abbey], England,” early 1840s, by William Henry Fox Talbot, via Museum of Photographic Arts Commons on flickr (both photos).
Lady Elizabeth Fox-Strangways Feilding was the photographer’s mother.
Talbot was one of the early fathers of photography. He developed the paper negative and the process of permanently fixing photos on chemically treated paper.
This is the body of light. . . .
— Ronald Johnson, from “BEAM 30: The Garden“
enclos*ure 