Estonian Photos - Part 8

 Estonian Photos

Here's another group of photos from the Tartu Ülikooli museum of anthropology in Estonia.

The museum provides no information about the men, other than the photos came from the Institute of Anatomy.  In particular, it does not say who these men are, or when or why the photos were taken.

My assumption has been that these are military recruits and that the photos were taken between World War I and World War II, when Estonia was an independent country, not part of the Russian Empire (before World War I) or the Soviet Union (after World War II up to 1991).

But that's just a guess.  Recently, an anonymous correspondent pointed out one other clue in the scant information provided by the museum.  

For each photo, it says the material is glass, i.e. photographic glass plates, not film.  Could that help us date these photos?

Dry glass plate photography started in 1871 and began to fall out of use in the 1920s, though it persisted until the 1970s for some scientific applications.  The Associated Press stopped using glass plates for news photography circa 1934.

This one is unusual, showing only one man.  Maybe something happened to #655.  He is missing from the collection.

Next we have this composite photo, showing #656 from both the side and rear (but the front is missing).  Again, this is unusual.  There are other photos in the collection showing only one man, not two, but I think this is the only composite photo showing two views of the same man.

I did some searching for glass plate photography in Estonia, and I found some references through the 1930s and one reference in the 1950s.

So it's still possible that these photos were taken between the World Wars, but the glass plate format suggests that they might be earlier.

So, are these photos from the era between the World Wars, or are they earlier, from the Czarist Russian era?  We still don't know.

We could definitely date the photos if we saw their style of clothing, but needless to say, that won't help us here.  Naked men are timeless.