Historical Portrait
Diebold twins, portrait photograph
Archive record
1 negative : safety ; 5 x 7 in.
About this photograph
Arnold Genthe photographed the Diebold twins in 1934. The negative was produced on safety film, a cellulose acetate stock that replaced the flammable nitrate base used in earlier decades.
Genthe worked in the soft-focus pictorialist style. He maintained a studio in San Francisco from 1896 to 1911, then moved to New York, where he continued photographing into the 1940s.
The Library of Congress acquired roughly 20,000 items from Genthe's unclaimed studio after his death in 1942. This collection includes several thousand studio portraits alongside photographs of San Francisco's Chinatown, dance subjects, and autochromes.
The archive record does not identify the twins further or indicate whether this was a commissioned sitting or part of a larger project.
Compiled from the catalogue record and reference notes on the formats and events involved. The archive record above is the primary source.
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