Time was, you could walk into almost any middle-class house in America and there’d be a framed family portrait on the wall.
Sunday clothes. Wide smiles. Airbrushed blemishes. Heads tilted, like a basket of puppies offered a treat.
Chances are, there was a stamp at the bottom of the portrait that read “Olan Mills,” which was once the gold standard for mass-market portrait photography.
For much of the second half of the 20th century, Olan Mills, headquartered here, was perhaps Chattanooga’s most-recognized brand. As late as 1993, the company had 15,000 workers worldwide. Fifteen thousand!
The 21st century has seen a slow decline of the formal portrait photography business. Instead of dressing little kids up for their annual visit to the portrait studio, more and more people simply default to their mobile-phone snapshots for precious memories. Meanwhile, upper-middle-class folks hire photographers to make outdoor portraits. White Oxford shirts and khakis, anyone?