POTW: Glass Plate Negatives

[Little girl with doll and doll carriage in yard], circa 1909; V1985.4.54, William Koch glass plate negatives, V1985.004, Brooklyn Historical Society.

The photo of the week is a dry plate glass negative from the William Koch glass negatives collection. This collection includes 66 photographs from about 1890 to right around 1925. William "Billy" Koch was an amateur photographer in Brooklyn and owned a tavern named Billy Cook's Saloon in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn. His photographs display houses, farms, and street scenes, as well as informal portraits of groups and individuals outdoors. I find this photograph particularly charming because it feels very candid, like a peek into the life of a young girl in the early 20^th century. To see more photographs from this collection, check out this gallery.

Brooklyn Historical Society has approximately 50,000 photographs in its collection, spanning from the 1850s to the present. This includes a variety of photographic processes, including glass plate negatives, like the photograph pictured above. The years when photography was highly experimental, one of the mediums on which photography was particularly successful was glass, perhaps for its sharpness as you can see in this example.

“Glass plate” refers to two separate photographic processes—dry plate and wet plate. Both processes include a light-sensitive emulsion that is fixed to the glass plate. The difference is the wet plate requires the photographer to apply the emulsion, while the dry plate comes prepared with the emulsion. You can often tell a dry plate from a wet plate in that the edges of the photo are straight and lacking brush strokes or even a thumb print!  You can imagine how challenging it might be to be outside setting up the shot, prepping your slide before placing it in the holder in the camera, then firing your shutter. To learn more about this history of glass plate negatives, including how to properly store these negatives for preservation, check out this site.

Interested in seeing more photos from BHS’s collection? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images. Interested in seeing even more historic Brooklyn images? Visit our Brooklyn Visual Heritage website here. To search BHS’s entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections visit BHS’s Othmer Library Wed-Sat, 1:00-5:00 p.m. library@brooklynhistory.org