Pinder Cabinet Portraits

 

 

 

Photographs from the studio of W. H. Pinder, circa 1880s. 

 

In the 19th century, photographers tended to be an itinerant lot, moving from town to town to maintain business.  W. H. Pinder was a photographer in Menasha for a time, but a news article from the December 23, 1890 Oshkosh Northwestern revealed that he had since moved from Menasha to Freeport, Illinois.  The presumption is that his time in Menasha had passed. 

 

The portrait above is of the Peter Jensen family.  The lone woman at the top of the blog post is unknown. 

 

Photography in the 19th century was constantly evolving- from glass plates to tintypes to ever larger images on photographic paper.  The format of the above photographs was called a "cabinet card."  This was a larger, more refined version of an earlier format called the "carte de visite" or, CDV, which had replaced the tintype.  By the early 1880s it had nearly replaced all CDVs, and was the dominant portrait format until the end of the century.