William Morgan: Treasures from the 50-cent photo bin

The best part of any New England antique shop, for my money, is the old photos. In some higher-end boutiques the postcards and pictures can be $5 apiece or more. But I struck pay dirt in Bowerbird & Friends, in Peterborough, N.H., which has scores of snapshots for 50¢ each. I bought five mysterious images.

The majority of those in the photo basket are 3 ½ -inch-square prints from the trusty Brownie box cameras of the 1950s.

There is a certain pathos in all these discarded records from a pre-digital age. While, far too few of these have any notation who and where the people are, this octet of friends is identified as "Picnic at Lillian Bliss Summer house in Otis" (Massachusetts, presumably), dated most accurately by the loafers and bobby sox.

Almost as typical is the earlier 20th-Century group photo posed before a church. The picture is 4 by 2 ½ inches.

The faded color of this mystery photo would seem to be earlier than the Nov. 73 date stamped on the back. At first, this appeared to be a man with a still, but on closer inspection the plastic jugs seem to hold apple cider. How New England, how autumnal.

Even odder is the 2 ½-by-4 ½ inch carte de visite of Dr. Chas. C. Peck, the coroner of McHenry County, Ill., from the summer of 1910. Or perhaps it is a political handout, as our lugubrious-looking Dr. Peck is a candidate for Supreme Medical Examiner, Mystic Workers of the World. Despite its dark title, the Workers were a Midwestern fraternal organization that sold insurance to its members. Their medical examiners presumably decided on whom should be underwritten and who was too much of a risk, or in Peck's case, if they were still among the living.

Strangest of the quintet of Peterborough oddities is this photograph of wedding guests from Aug. 3, 1963, in an era when most women still wore hats to such events, not to mention pearls. The picture was taken by Robert English, probably the state senator from nearby Hancock, N.H. (whose district included Peterborough and Dublin). The ceremony was perhaps taken at the tony Dublin Lake Club, where the senator's daughter was married three years later. Just an amateur shot, perhaps, but English has really captured a slice-of-life social commentary: the moneyed Republican couple, the grand dame, and frumpy and awkward daughter.

William Morgan, a Providence-based essayist and architectural historian, has taught the history of photography at Princeton University and is the author of Monadnock Summer: The Architectural Legacy of Dublin, New Hampshire.