How did they manage to keep these cats still long enough to get a good picture? I thought old cameras required you to be still for several seconds?
It’s a very good question - though the 1870s is about when “dry plate” photography was introduced, and during the decade, exposure time potentially dropped below a second (depending on the what/where/how of the photograph).
Roughly 1850-1860ish is when you’re looking at over ten or twenty seconds for a photo, which is probably a “cat sitting still” limit. Earlier than that you start going towards minutes and hours for a photograph. I think there are cat photos from the 1840s, though I imagine the photos are blurry or the cats are asleep
If you want a bunch of early cat photos to look at, in the UK, there was a cat photographer, Henry/Harry Pointer, who was seemingly pretty well established in the 1870s. Photohistory Sussex - Henry Pointer (scroll down to the “Brighton Cats” bit)
Depends on how old the photo is. In the 1870s, the technology advanced to the point that a photograph could be taken in a fraction of a second.
