The Traveling Pony Quest: Itinerant Photography
Monday, August 9, 2010 
(Top to bottom: Lisa Wallen, Temple Terrace (Tampa), Florida, circa 1958; Mike, Buddy and Rose Logsdon, Kentucky, circa 1951; Uncle Billy Wallen, age 10, Indianapolis, Indiana, September 15, 1944)
Happy Monday! I hope your week is off to a good start, because we’ve got lots in store for you here at HH. Let’s jump right in with the next chapter of our quest to discover the truth behind the Traveling Pony phenomenon.
Today’s photos come to us from Lisa Wallen Logsdon of Florida, who blogs over at Old Stones Undeciphered. I came across Lisa’s blog early in my Traveling Pony research, and she generously agreed to share these three wonderful family photos. Lisa says:
“Back in the 50s it seemed so much came to you door to door. We had the milk man, the egg man, the vegetable man, the Fuller Brush man, and the pony photographer! I was the horse lover in the family so my mother forked out the money so I'd get to sit on the pony and have my picture taken. I was thrilled of course! I finally realized my dream when I bought my first horse in my early 20s, a stunning registered red dun quarter horse gelding. Those were the days! Now I'm a grandmother and I don't ride anymore but I still think about all the fun times I had with that horse and all my friends and their horses.”
Boy, with the amount of door-to-door traffic at Lisa’s house, you’d never have to leave! By comparison, my modern-day doorstep seems quite the bore; all I get are junk advertisements and package deliveries, mostly from online stores (it seems Fuller Brush even pedal their wares online these days). I’d like to point out, as I postulated last Thursday, that all three of these photos feature paint ponies; I especially love the saddle bag in Uncle Billy’s photo – that’s some serious attention to detail on behalf of the photographer, and I can only hope there are pony treats inside. I’d also like to invite Lisa to share some photos of her beautiful red dun quarter horse, but in the meantime, our Traveling Pony quest forges on.
Between the photos we’ve seen from Mike and Lisa so far (spanning the distance from California to Florida, respectively), it’s clear that Traveling Pony Photographers – like door-to-door salesmen – have a rich tradition in American history. As with any good story, though, we’ve got to go back to the beginning to get to the heart of it.
And I mean the very beginning. Waaay back. And across the Atlantic, too, if you really want the nitty-gritty.
And so we find ourselves in Paris, 1839. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a French chemist and theatrical designer who’d recently invented the Diorama, has just revealed the very first method of recording life-like images with a direct-positive process he humbly calls the ‘Daguerreotype.’ Daguerreotyping is an intricate, delicate, time-consuming affair by today’s standards, involving polished and sensitized silver plates, a lengthy exposure period (in 1839, exposures took 15-30 minutes, necessitating the employment of ‘head rests, clamps and posing stands;’ you can see neat diagrams of these here), image development over a hot dish of mercury (hellooo, occupational hazard!), and finally, bathing the plates in something called hyposulphate of soda. Let’s not disregard the fact that the whole apparatus must have weighed a ton, involving several different cabinets, boxes, plates, buffers, dishes, stands and clamps, and when the image was finally finished, you had to seal the thing in glass and bind it in a metal frame to prevent immediate oxidation. A long and tedious process, no?
Despite the hassle, though, the popularity of daguerreotypes quickly spread to the masses; beforehand, folks were forced to pose several days (or weeks!) for portrait paintings (if they could afford one), which would have made 30 minutes sound pretty good. By 1850, over 70 daguerreotype studios had set up shop in New York City alone, but that’s just the beginning; whenever there’s a new fad in town, you can bet those scheming opportunists will emerge from the ether and find a way to capitalize on it.
Enter the Itinerant Photographer, who, like the many portrait painters, skipped the studio altogether and brought the camera directly to the customer. In North America, itinerant photographers got their start working for the government, documenting geologic and railroad surveys. It wasn’t until the Civil War that traveling portraiture really took hold; families sending their sons to battle wanted something to remember them by, and daguerreotyping experienced a significant boom, even among the working class. In fact, according to the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, Volume I, “Lowly soldiers seeing for the first time itinerants traveling into war theatres often dubbed the horse drawn studios as ‘What-Is-It?’ wagons.”
So horses and itinerant photographers have been comrades since the early days of the profession, though the wagon-drawn studios were soon to change. By the 1850s, the daguerreotype was already being phased out by the less-expensive ambrotype, and later by the tintype, which yielded an almost-instant image. As the trade simplified, itinerant photographers became more mobile, which afforded new possibilities.
And just what were those possibilities? You’ll have to stay tuned for the next installment of the Quest for the Traveling Pony Photographer to find out! Better yet, contribute to the story by submitting your own Traveling Pony photo!
Reader Comments (8)
I love the bling on those ponies.
Me, too! These browbands would not be out of place in the dressage ring today :)
What a story! Good research, Abby! I would read a book chapter (or two) about this...hint, hint :)
Thanks, Shane! There's more to come!
I love the smiles too! And Lisa's really has some bling!
I wonder if this would fly today? If people would want such photos. Part of me sadly thinks not...
First I’d like to say we came across all the pictures when we were looking to add more vintage pony picture to our vintage page. We added them and a little of the story that goes with them and we hope that is ok with everyone?
We are doing this today in the Southern California area! I did this back in the early 80’s and worked in the Whittier, Pico Rivera, Santa Fe Springs and well all over from Long beach to Pasadena to Moreno Valley! Today we’re still not sure we can make it work but it’s not going to bad. The Cities are the tough part sadly. We also do birthday parties and school events but our goal is to keep it traditional as musch as possible! Can we send you one of our current pictures for your only paper… ?
Need an e-mail address!
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