professors

beautiful portrait !!

Isn't it fascinating that the first impression one gets from viewing this image is that pipe smoking must surely be a joy. It is truly a shame that society has become so generically uniform that a photo like this would be perceived as shameful. By the way, does anyone recall that Walter Cronkite once smoked his pipe on his evening broadcasts? added to my personal online blog: robertlhuffstutterblog.blogspot.com/

The man on the right is my maternal grandfather.

It's nice to see family connections made on the Flickr Commons, @ptstarr!

Photo bears date June 7, 1911, as does the cornerstone itself: www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2163478442/in/p... The gentlemen identified by name are Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, and Seth Low, former Columbia president and former Mayor of New York City, who in 1911 was chairman of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The son of a wealthy China trader, Low had donated the Low Memorial Library to Columbia University, naming it for his father.

Wystan: Thanks for bringing our attention to the date on the negative, and for the more complete information about Butler and Low. We'll add these to the record next time we update.

Louisa Lee Schuyler (1837-1926); her wikipedia entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisa_Lee_Schuyler This is apparently a photograph from Columbia University's commencement in 1915; Schuyler received an honorary LL.D. that day, the first woman so honored at Columbia. Virginia C. Gildersleeve (1877-1965); her wikipedia entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Gildersleeve Gildersleeve was the Dean of Barnard College.

To learn more about Mary Steichen Calderone, please visit a blog post about her - blog.photography.si.edu/2009/03/16/adventures-in-the-morgue/

You can also learn more about Nathalia Clara Ruth Crane in this interesting blog post. ;-)

Now on Wikimedia Commons

Right you are Pixel Wrangler. Thanks!

The grease pencil crop marks visible on the photo weren't made by the photographer. They were made by Science Service before they made a copy of the photo for publication. During 1920s and 1930s, they sometimes airbrushed out backgrounds or cropped publicity photographs supplied to them by others, presumably to produce what they perceived as more suitable "head shots".