History:

Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014712025/. Contrast restored with Photoshop. The photograph appears to have been taken in New York on board the liner Imperator on January 18, 1921. Near it in the Library’s archive of the Bain News Service are shipboard photographs of Claude Grahame-Wright, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014712023/, and Major James de Rothschild, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014712022/, two men mentioned in the New York Times’s coverage of the arrival, “Imperator Late; Met Storm a Day” (January 19, 1921, page 4). The text further explains,

And all that remains in focus to tell the tale is the instrument of its telling: holding the image steady for us from its subordinate position at the margin, a tripod joined to its camera.