Note her earrings. Clearly not a fake picture; it’s a known historical person.
Pierced ears were popular in the United States through the early 1920s…
Ah heck - read the whole thing.
It seems it has indeed been a Western practice well before the 1960’s - for centuries at least.
How popular it is now is rather irrelevant. The point is it’s all that was available for the wearing of earrings in the 1900’s.
Inbred royalty?
Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. His brother was Emperor Franz-Josef of Austria-you know, the guy who started WWI after his nephew, the Archduke Ferdinand was killed?
Speaking of Franz-Josef, his wife was the famous beauty, Empress Sisi, or Elisabeth of Bavaria.
No, they are not fake, they are real antique photos. The person who posted them collects real antique photos.
In regards to the ear piercing thing… one only need to visit an antique jewelry store to see that there are plenty of earrings for pierced ears from the 1800s. In fact, looking through a lot of antique, Victorian-era photos, most of the women have their ears pierced.
Arrggh! I meant to say in the 1800’s.
Ahhh, they’re 1800’s-style “Death Gaze”.
I’m just knocked out by the picture of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, nyctea’s number seven. It’s obvious that Russian royalty was able to hire the best photographers. Most of the other pictures we’ve seen in this thread are workmanlike, run-of-the-mill photos, and a few of them show a little artistry in their attention to light and modeling.
But the picture of Liz is just head and shoulders above them all in virtually every respect. The main thing is the lighting. It’s extremely rare to see images from that period that are backlit so dramatically. The composition is careful but not boring. The gown she’s wearing is spectacular. Her pose is elegant and sensitive, and highlights her lovely profile, long eyelashes, and very attractive figure.
What a magnificent image! It’s become one of my favorite portraits.
(Too bad she was murderedat the age of 54.)
Actually, Maximillian was terribly vain. He paid money to his executioners to not shoot hime in the face. They took the money, but shot him in the face, anyway.
Way more than half of the DG’s look great to me, and I don’t much care for sorority girls.
A lot of it is due to the photo technology. This is a very high contrast photo.
I see lots of black, lots of white, and not too much grey. So all thier faces are a bit washed out. I bet it was taken with a flash (powder pan?) right near the camera, because the lighting also seems very flat, obscuring thier cheekbones, dimples and such.
Just want to say that I completely agree with you. That is a gorgeous photo!
Let me see if I can word this another way.
I’m not trying to say “Damn, it looks like they forgot how to breed 'em for about 50 years or so.”
I’ve seen some realist paintings from the 1800s that show women in more natural poses, without Victorian dress, and they look great. Also, I’ve see high school yearbooks from the early 1910s online, and despite the high necklines, lack of smiling and bushy eyebrows also found in photos of the previous century, some of the women looked kinda’ cute.
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cribbs/oh_canton/
http://www.heightslibrary.org/ma_lib_info.php?action=year_book_1911
(Looking through old yearbooks, I really didn’t start seeing images of smiling until the mid-1910s. - see http://www.archives.upenn.edu/primdocs/upm/upm7200/upm7200_1915.pdf for an example.)
The photos I’ve all seen from before the 1910s or so, with a few exceptions, seem to depict rather homely women. I’m wondering if there was some kind of Victorian-era cultural more where it was considered “unbecoming” or “too forward” for a woman to look pretty, almost like in a certain subculture of womyn today.
You’re allowed to smile in Australian passport photos, as long as your teeth aren’t visible (ie, no grinning).
As other people have said, photography was not the commonplace hobby it is today until the 1910s or so, and so getting your photograph taken was a Formal Event. (It’s worth noting that a lot of early photographs show people in their best clothes with the family rifle, as it would have been one of their most expensive and valued possessions.)
Formal Clothes (back then, at least) were more about being Formal Clothes than making a fashion statement (ie, making women attractive), and shouldn’t be used as a real indicator of how attractive the women in the photos actually were in person outside the formal setting of a photographer’s studio.
Also bear in mind that in 1887 it was considered acceptable to discriminate against non-white people, women weren’t allowed to vote, and if you saw a man in a skirt you shot him and nicked his country. In short, we can’t apply our values in 2008 to the 19th century.
With those long exposure times, how DID they pose for pornographic pictures, in the 1880’s? 
Remember that there were some HUGE advances in photography right at the turn of the century: when the first Kodak came out, photography went from this huge complex formal thing to something people did casually. With practice, people learned how to pose for a camera, they learned what looked flattering and what didn’t.
I’ve read so many books and diaries and such from the period, and I’ve never seen or heard anything that suggested women were trying to downplay their looks. If anything, it was the era that invented beauty products.
Duh. Homely girls. No chance of losing control. Aren’t you paying attention?
The fluffers were too hot to photograph.
It’s fun to read the notes for each senior. I wonder which female yearbook staff member Elva Weidler pissed off? 
What about Helene Willis? “She should have been a boy” (What could that have referred to?)
I think, quite logically, there were beautiful women in the past, since there are beautiful women today, and they descended from somewhere. Much of the differences between our perceptions of beauty and these pics have already been discussed - photo technology, standards of dress and grooming norms - but there remain universal notions of attractiveness that I’m certain would still apply to past generations.
Actually, there is a lot of wonderful pornographic photography from around the turn of the last century, featuring beautiful smiles. I get the impression that the first x-rated photograph is only a day or two less old than the first photograph.
Yup. That kind of stuff can have tragic, world-altering consequences. Some very messed up circumstances led to that law.
What I’m trying to say here is that I’m Winston Churchill’s father.
If you ever go back there, tell Lord Randolph that I’m sorry, but it’s not like I was the first… or the second, or the third, or the fourth. That girl got around!
ETA: I’m still wondering why she is so, so hot, and the other women are so, so not. 