ClassyArts.com is my magnum opus — I being Andrew J Morris — former archaeologist, now genealogist and web entrepreneur. The ClassyArts Blog is a branch of that website, devoted to discussing the current state of affairs on the site, plans for the future, and progress, as well as miscellaneous notes on photohistory, dating photographs and related subjects.
Of particular interest to this site and its users, is the dating and identifying of old photographs. I am actively conducting research on the characteristics and features of old photos that are indicative of the date, or I should say dates, when a picture was taken and when it was printed. In some cases those two dates are decades apart!
The ClassyArts site has a massive database of information on historic photographers (approaching 60,000 records) — the largest such database in the world, I am proud to say — and it is still growing. That resource provides an invaluable aid to determining the age of photographs by known photographers. Luckily for us, photographers put their names and addresses on millions of old photographs or their mounts, so the photographer is known more often than not.
Adding Artists Soon
In 2004 I published a series of ebooks on Little Known American Artists, giving dates and locations for over 12,000 persons listed as artists in 19th century directories. That information has been added to and expanded so much since that time that now, with over 20,000 records from directories and census records, it is growing unwieldy for the ebook format. So I have decided to add that data to the ClassyArts site, as a complement to the huge list of photographic artists from all over the world. It will be available when the ClassyArts site is updated (early 2010).
Feedback
Your comments and feedback are welcome on the ClassArts Blog, where you can comment on any particular post, or if you have a general comment just post it as a comment to our first post: ClassyArts Blog. We appreciate your feedback, and have tried to make it as easy as possible to comment — you don’t even need to ’sign-up’ or give us your email address (the form requests it, but that can be left blank).
Keeping Updated
If you want a monthly update by email that tells you what has happened here and on the ClassyArts site over the past month, you can ‘join’ the blog using the ‘join’ link near the bottom of the right column. Or you can use the link there to subscribe to the RSS feed.
Contact Me
If you wish to contact me, there will be a contact form on the ClassyArts.com site when it is updated (scheduled for early 2010), or for now just used this form on my genealogy site (be sure to mention ClassyArts so I know which site you are referring to). If you have digital copies of photographs you would like to send, contact me with that form first, then use the email from the response to send images.