Academic research: musings

[ariel]

You are absolutely correct: circumstances determine a lot. Although, despite wearing authentic clothes from a bygone era, 99.99% of your time you were not wearing them, you kinda pretended. Your grandfather was authentic, you were not.
My only major hesitation is about staged photo-opportunities, especially "studio" ones.
A Jim mentioned in another topic, virtually all soldiers of the US Civil War were photographed en face, with arms crossed in front of their chests, one holding a Colt, another a Bowie knife, and often at least one of them was used in several different portraits:-)
The same is true about the Caucasus: the " mountaineers" assuming insanely unnatural postures, and there was a lot of studio photos of female Russian visitors somewhere from Moscow, St. Peterburg, Kiev etc, to the local "mineral baths" , dressed in full Cossack regalia, with medals, shashka and kindjal.