UNDATED – Portrait of a family with a boy in the living room of their house. © Mark Zanzig/zanzig.com/Photo: Gorber Family Archive
The story behind the image
Here’s another photo from our from our family archive. It is an undated portrait taken in the living room of their house. Sadly, very little context is given. No names, no locations, and not even dates.
The image belongs to a small set of images taken in or around 1910 that are clearly efforts to learn the technique of photography in various situations. I write that because the images do not even remotely achieve the quality levels of professional photographers in 1910. Several images show self portraits (or, to stick with modern terms, Selfies) and/or private situations, e.g. at home in the library or living room, hanging the laundry to dry, in the snow or under the Christmas Tree.
In principle, this portrait was pretty good in my view. It is sufficiently sharp and well exposed, and the pose matches professional photography standards of the period.
Like other prints from this specific image set, the print is in a truly horrible condition. It has faded almost completely (see comparison below) and shows countless spots. Fortunately, it is a cabinet photo and pretty large. This gave the scanner something to chew on. 🙂 I scanned it at 1200 dpi which is a rather low resolution for a cabinet photo. The restoration went quite well, and the 2026 variant looks as fresh as professional shots from that period and is with 43 Megapixel still quite large.
In case you are wondering how the print looked before the editing, here’s a 1:1 comparison of the color-calibrated scan and its digital twin, and – yes! – the original really looks like this today.
The high resolution image
| Capture Date | undated, c. 1910 |
| Image Source | Cabinet Photo, c. 11.9 x 16.4 cm black & white albumen print mounted to cardboard |
| Digital Image Source | EPSON Perfection 4870 Photo |
| Digital Image Source Format | TIFF, 48 bits/pixel, sRGB |
| Edited Image Format | JPEG, 24 bits/pixel, sRGB |
| Edited Image Dimensions | 5605 x 7759 Pixels |
| Copyright | © Mark Zanzig/zanzig.com/Photo: Gorber Family Archive |
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