Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Okay, okay. It's a cute picture. What can I say? At 3 years old I was quite charming. But that's not what's cool about this picture. This picture, from the mid '60s, was taken before color portrait photography was widely available or affordable and long before 1 hour processing. Photography studios, such as Olan Mills, would send their negatives off to photo labs to be developed and, if the customer paid extra, colorized. That's one ot the careers my mother used to have. She would use very fine brushes to apply oil paints directly to the finished photograph to produce a color portrait. And that's what's great about this picture, hand painted by my own mother.

No comments: