These vintage Easter images are part of OldPixels.com, a collection of Victorian Era art that I've been researching and acquiring for about 20 years. I enjoy collecting and sharing the vision of these vintage images almost as much as my own photographs.
A collection of 30 vintage Easter images is available on Flickr for sending e-greetings to your friends (to share or download, click the magnifying glass above the image). I enjoy collecting the traditional symbols of Easter: the eggs, chicks, and bunnies, but the reason for Easter is still one of my most popular downloads.
My collecting includes both photographs and chromolithographs (chromos) from the period of about 1880 through about 1915. Chromos were printed from hand-engraved limestone blocks. Many of these chromos required over a dozen stone masters, with a different ink color for each block; and each color had to be printed within a registration accuracy of less than 1/64th of an inch.
Many of the photographs are photo-postcards. They are real, black & white, photographs that were often sepia-toned and then hand-tinted by the members of the photographer's studio staff (usually women), and then sold to locals and tourists.
Sending and collecting postcards was extremely popular worldwide, from about 1893 to about 1915. During this period, in the United States, a postcard could be mailed for one cent -- hence the term, the "penny postcard."
Many of my collected images come from estate purchases, where the prized postcard collection of a great aunt or grandmother is found and sold, because no one in the family has interest in the collection.
I invite you to share these reflections of the past with your family and friends. This was a time when virtue and honor were fashionable and sought after. A simpler time when you didn't need a Zip Code to mail a post card -- or even a house number for that matter!
Daily doses of Featured Vision can be found on my Twitter tweet: YourPhotoVision. They are also archived on Twitter, under the hashtag: fotoINSPIRED (#fotoinspired).
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