I happened on this article whilst browsing the archives of a Paris-based blogger I like.
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Thanks for posting a link to this. It’s an interesting article and the photos of the era are lovely. I had a book by a historian years ago that was all about how families took photos of their dead so I was interested to see some here. One of my uncles was Polish and when his mother died in the early 80s he couldn’t go to the funeral so his family sent photos of her beautifully laid out with her rosary wound around her hands.
And then there’s this interesting history of Swiss in California…of course I knew about Sutter and some of the others, but their stories are really amazing.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1262&context=sahs_review
The images are sooooo sharp. Incredible.
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It’s not so incredible, the black and white analog films actually had a really good resolution, much better then iPhones for a decade or two with their digital poor cameras 
I have some family photos from before WWII incredible quality, though they were scanned from the photo paper in this century instead of from the original film. Some got yellowish tint already, but it doesn’t diminish the quality
I have a selfie of my grandfather circa 1915–no selfie sticks then, so he used a tripod. He’s dressed in good tweed and sat casually on a wall. Mother told me he ran the shutter tube up his pant leg and put the bulb in his pocket. He printed it in an enormous format, about 30 cm wide, but it is crisp and clear. He was a right basteward by all accounts, but a handsome arrogant one.
Decade or two? Cameras only came to the iPhone in 2007 admittedly with only a 2MP front camera. Within a decade the iPhone cameras we’re better quality than many digital cameras.