Foursome Flying over Long Beach, California, 1914

A Vintage Photos Theme Park photo for the theme of pick a particular format (daguerreotype, cabinet card, CDV, real photo postcard, cyanotype, slide, Polaroid, or what have you?) .

Handwritten caption: "Betty -- J.G.R. -- Louise -- Harry. Venice -- 1914."

This is a real photo postcard showing two couples -- Betty and J.G.R. along with Louise and Harry -- pretending to ride in an early biplane (see a cropped version of the photo for a better view of the foursome). The design of the Noko stamp box on the other side of the card indicates a date range of 1907 to 1929, which corresponds to the handwritten year of 1914 on the front.

Although the caption indicates the location as "Venice," the structure pictured below the biplane was the pier in Long Beach -- not Venice -- California. The photo, of course, is a montage composed of a studio photo of the plane and its flyers along with the addition of a separate image of the pier.

For a similar shot of an early plane, see Buzzing the Beach in a Biplane, Los Angeles, Calif.

For an interesting discussion of the captions and messages on other real photo postcards, see Kenneth Wilson, Snapshots and Short Notes: Images and Messages of Early Twentieth-Century Photo Postcards (University of North Texas Press, 2020).