Vintage baby pictures from a prominent White House photographer
Here are five photos of Aileen Havlin Harris (later Aileen Harris Jordan), who was born on October 7, 1915 in Washington DC. Her mother and father, Martha Ewing and George W. Harris, co-owned the highly-esteemed Harris & Ewing Inc. photographic studio in DC.
Among his many accomplishments, Harris & Ewing became the official White House photographer in the early 1900s, and served in that position from the Roosevelt through Eisenhower administrations, and included this portrait of President Woodrow Wilson that is now part of the Smithsonian collection.
Harris & Ewing donated 700,000 of their more than five million negatives to the Library of Congress (LOC), among which we discovered these vintage baby pictures of young Aileen. (Below her pictures, you can also see what her parents looked like.)
Keep in mind that the LOC apparently converted the negatives to prints, so the little girl’s images lack some of the refinements that the company’s portrait printing process would have included.
Miss Aileen Harris: Antique portraits of a little girl, from baby to toddler to preschooler
Baby Aileen, probably early 1916
Toddler Aileen, about 2 years old, around 1918
DON’T MISS: See how different antique baby carriages & old-fashioned strollers used to be
Little preschool-age Aileen, around age 4 in 1920
Aileen’s parents, 12 years before she was born
This 1903 picture of Martha Ewing and George W. Harris, of Harris & Ewing Inc., was “taken in Hot Springs, Arkansas or California,” by photographer Norman E McLeod. Their old-fashioned horse-drawn carriage was the star of the shot! (We also included a close-up of the couple below.)
The caption from their daughter, Aileen Harris Jordan, also says, “Both were then working for Bushnell Studio in San Francisco.”
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