Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Life is but a dream in this turn-of-the-century photograph titled Rafting Party.

In 1881, under the slogan "Cameras for the Millions," the E. & H.T. Anthony firm began marketing to the modern amateur photographer small box cameras that could easily be hand held and George Eastman's commercial dry plates. Soon many other simple portable cameras flooded the market, making the formerly complicated process of photography a pastime for thousands of Americans.

According to an 1883 article in the New York Times, it was now common to see "nicely dressed young fellows loaded down with cameras and tripods at the trains and steam-boats" on their way to the country to photograph "a bit of romantic landscape, river, or mountainside." With shutter speeds of about 1/20th a second, amateurs delighted in making "instantaneous" pictures of family and friends.

Source: Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

Pictured: Unidentified, active 20th century, Rafting Party, about 1910, silver print on paper mounted on paperboard, 4 3/4 x 6 5/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.