Check out this almost hundred-year old photo album!

Jan 22

Written By ASH

Sitting in a box of distant family photos, I came across this peculiar, beautiful little booklet. It’s called a Hold-Pat Snapshot album and it was made exclusively by the Baldwin Studio in Saint Louis, Missouri. These albums were originally marketed in the 1930s to include 6-8 film exposures developed and printed in one of these albums, plus shipping, all for 25 cents.

Of course at first, this sounds like a crazy deal. But, consider the buying power of a single quarter one hundred years ago [about $6.25 today]. And that works out to be about $1 per exposure by today’s standards, which is almost exactly what film development costs these days.

For instance, to get a 35mm roll of film [typically 36 exposures] with digital scans costs about $30 with shipping. Now, that is considering the modern push toward digital. A good, high quality photographic print is still going to be at least $1. So it would be fair to argue the price of having physical film photos has doubled in the last hundred years. Considering the price gouging running rampant in our society, I’d say that’s not too bad. But I’d definitely still rather be paying 1930s prices.

I had to disassemble the booklet in order to get a scan of the booklet itself. I risked Tetanus by prying open a very rusted 3 -prong mechanism holding the pages together. The last slide shows what the back of each print might look like.

We have no clue who these people are, and no clue what called for the luxury of photographs. The background of the first photo of a group of women shows what’s probably a relatively new automobile on the left, and what looks like ‘the men’ gathered undoubtedly with tobacco in hand, on the right.

The only clues as to location might be the two ladies on the pier. That spot doesn’t look familiar to me…it could be from anywhere. Of course there’s always the possibility these were snapshots from an out of town visit, and were only developed here in St Louis. A mystery.

These last three are also interesting to me. A number but no street name…I would love to see what that address looks like today. The fella I would assume is the homeowner. He looks rather proud.