Cabinet Photo Wedding Couple From Vienna Austria

This is a cabinet photo of a bride and groom from Vienna, Austria.  Austria was the "Austro" part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time, Hapsburgs and all.  It must have been an interesting Empire, but it didn't survive WWI.

There are a couple of interesting things about this photo:  the subjects, and the clothing styles of the bride.

The man seems to be extremely tall, and the woman is normal height at best.  He is taller than she is, even though he his seated and she is standing.  It's true, she's leaning in a little, but if he were standing, she probably would not even reach his shoulder, height wise.

The woman's dress is inconveniently short for a cabinet photo.  I always thought that these kinds of photos were exclusively from the late 19th or very early 20th century.  To me her wedding dress looks straight out of the 1920s, and if that is true it is very inconvenient indeed.  My knowledge would be somewhat shaken.

Of course this photo is from Europe so maybe they made these  types of photos later there, maybe clothing styles changed there before they did in the USA.  I know from photos that styles were somewhat different - for example, a lot of central European men of the late 19th & early 20th century had "Kaiser Bill" (handlebar) mustaches - most American men didn't.   But it's hard to believe a woman in the 1890s would wear a dress that short.

I don't like it when things in photos don't quite match things I thought I knew.   It's a nice photo tho.

Photograph of a Wedding Party, circa 1920s-30s, probably German

This is a photograph of a wedding party, taken outside.  I counted 39 people in all.  It's a large photo, just over 7 inches tall and almost 10 inches wide.

There is no photographer's information or any other writing to give a clue as to where this is or who these people are. So we examined it closely and drew our own conclusions.

First there is its physical appearance - thin photographic paper mounted on thin cardboard.  We saw no silvering on the photo, but that's not hard and fast proof that it's an albumen as opposed to a gelatin silver print.  The overall physical look is of a photo produced in the earlier part of the 20th century - certainly before WWII.

Second, and most obvious, are the clothing & hair styles, especially for the younger women. From the bridal gown to the children sitting in front, it screams 1920s-30s fashions.

And third - the only clue we could find as to where this might be - there is a young man in a military uniform  in the row behind the bride, about to the left. We believe that is a German uniform.

So, this photo was probably taken somewhere in Germany, in the late 1920s to early 1930s.

If we're right, those people's lives were in for a massive amount of upheaval in the relatively near future.   By now, everyone in this photo is dead. They lived their life, dealt with whatever their times threw at them, accomplished whatever it was they accomplished, and by the 1980s or 1990s, most, if not all of them had died.  It is possible some of the children are still living, but they'd be very old - in their 90s, most likely.