Captured here: From 1890 To 1960, It Was Fashionable To Wear Black Wedding Dresses In Spain. It was taken in 1890, and like the best archival images it needs almost no explanation — the frame tells its own story.
By the 1890s the modern world was arriving fast: electric light, telephones, streetcars, and the first automobiles all appeared in cities during this decade. Photography had matured too, and inexpensive cameras meant ordinary moments were being recorded in numbers never seen before.
Pictures of ordinary life are some of the most valuable historical documents we have. Grand events were always going to be recorded, but a normal day — how people worked, dressed, shopped, and passed the time — survives only when someone happened to point a camera at it.
