08/19/2026
Happy World Photography Day!
These aren't your great-great-great-grandpa's portrait photos. No stiff poses, formal dresses, or vacant expressions here - in fact, if you look past the turn-of-the-century outfits, some of these pics from Egbert C. Hadley's 1910 photo album look strikingly like candid snapshots of modern Midd Kids enjoying a weekend outing. The reason we're able to get a glimpse of Egbert's friend group in their natural environment 116 years later? The Kodak Brownie: a brand-new technology that was cheap enough for college students, user-friendly enough for hobbyists, and portable enough for rowboats. Egbert and several of his friends must have brought their Brownies along on their adventures, because this album contains not just pictures taken on Brownies, but pictures taken of people taking pictures with their Brownies!
Fun fact: the viewfinders on early Brownie models, like the Brownie 2 and 2As pictured in Egbert's album, were located on the tops, not the backs, of the camera body. So an amateur photographer trying to capture (for example) his friends' pipe-smoking human pyramid would have to peer down into a small window, rather than raising the camera to eye level, in order to make sure everybody was in frame. That's why several of Egbert's friends were captured looking down at their own cameras in these images.
