Annual Delaware Antiques Show 2019

Open for Business: Photography, Trade, and Self-Image, 1870–1950 By Catharine Dann Roeber A nineteenth-century sweet shop, a black-owned beauty salon, and a prominent Wilmington, Delaware, jazz club are very different businesses, but owners and workers at each turned to photography to portray themselves, their goods, and services. A student-curated exhibition at Winterthur, Open for Business: Photography, Trade, and Self-Image, 1870–1950, invites visitors to see and hear the stories of businesses, both local and national, through photographs, oral histories, and objects from the collections at Winterthur and the Delaware Historical Society. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, businesses in the United States offered an increasingly wide array of merchandise and amenities. To entice customers and to celebrate their workplaces, owners and workers took advantage of new advertising strategies, including photography. Advancements in photographic processes provided the means to broaden the scope of who and what were represented through the photographic lens. Winterthur’s collections are well known for documenting histories of craftsmanship and trades in early America. However, the library and museum collections also hold a treasure of materials referencing trades and tradespeople from the second half of Fig. 1. Shoemaker, United States, 1850–70. Ambrotype in case. Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Library 85x188 — 127 —