When last I wrote, Chris and I were in Verona, Italy. Four months later, and here we are back in NJ, where we arrived at the beginning of March.  However, since then we’ve driven north – and then south – and then north again, visiting family, doing research, working on projects … the time goes by before you realize it.

But I have some news: I have finally launched my Photographs, Pistols & Parasols podcast! This is part of the project on early women photographers I’ve been  working on since the end of 2015. Technical challenges were bigger than I’d hoped, but I’ve finally sorted out enough of them to get the podcast off the ground. Yay!

On the podcast, I share the stories of early women artisan photographers, celebrating the accomplishments of women whose professional photography careers began between 1840-1930.

BTW, you might be wondering, what’s a podcast?  Essentially, it’s a free radio show on the Internet. Two episodes are available now; new episodes will be posted on the 1st and the 15th of the month.

There are two ways to listen to the podcast:

Option 1: You can subscribe  (for free) using applications like iTunes or Google Play or others; the advantage to subscribing is that you automatically get alerted when there’s a new episode.  To subscribe to Photographs, Pistols & Parasols, you can find it listed on  iTunes, Google Play Music or wherever you look for podcasts.   If you subscribe and like it, I’d appreciate it if you would leave a rating (and optionally a review) – that will help it get boosted up on the rankings on the podcast sites, which in turn will help me potentially attract sponsors.

Option 2: If all that sounds confusing – i.e., you don’t know what  a podcast is and/or if you’ve never listened to one, and don’t already use an audio app to listen to podcasts — you can listen to it directly from my new website:  p3photographers.net.  You’ll just need to check back there periodically for the new episodes (posted on the 1st and the 15th of every month).   There are two there now.

Whichever way you choose, I hope you enjoy Photographs, Pistols & Parasols!

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Links
Subscribe to Photographs, Pistols & Parasols now on iTunes or Google Play Music  or wherever you find your podcasts
More info at p3photographers.net

Well, the short answer is that the project — and the idea for the podcast — continues on track, even though actually getting the actual podcast up and running got slightly derailed by all the travelling Chris and I have been doing this past year. On the up side, though, much of the travel has been directly related to gathering material for the project, and Chris and I have been uncovering lots of interesting stories to be included on the podcast.

That includes material gathered during 8 weeks we stayed in Arcata, CA this past summer.

I bring this up today because over the weekend, due to our Arcata landlady’s network of contacts (thanks, Bella!), my project and I were featured in an article in the Times-Standard newspaper in Eureka, the next town over from Arcata.  Click here to read the article. Fun!

One advantage of staying put here in Verona for a little while is that it gives me some time to put a new website together, as well as work on the podcast. The name of the podcast, and its tagline, are now

Photographs, Pistols, and Parasols
Early Artisan Women Photographers

That’s all a bit long to translate directly into theaURL for a new website, of course, and also a bit cumbersome for a social media hashtag.  So, those things will instead use a shorter form, p3artisans.

BTW, in case you don’t feel like reading the article, or the old blog post, here’s a quick recap of what I mean by “photographic artisans,” in order to explain what this podcast is going to be all about:

Women began photography careers as early as the 1840s, but the accomplishments of these early women photographers rarely rate a mention in the history books. Even the few woman who are occasionally included — e.g., Gertrude Käsebier, Berenice Abbott, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Dorothea Lange, and several others — are generally not well-known beyond a few specialists in the history of photography. 

Further, there is an implicit bias for photography that is seen as either artistically or socially relevant, and this bias extends to work by this canon of women photographers.  Although these women also had careers as studio and/or commercial photographers, that aspect of their work is rarely discussed.

It is not surprising, then, that the remarkable careers of other early women photographers also get left out of standard history of photography books. These photographic artisans were entrepreneurs who ran thriving photography businesses. They mastered cutting-edge technology to produce photos with ever-changing equipment. They spent their careers recording everyday life, photographing babies, families, weddings, businesses, buildings, events, etc. While a few examples occasionally survive of additional experimental or artistic work by some of these women, it is the everyday photography done by professional women photographers that takes center stage in Coming into Focus: Female Photographic Entrepreneurs 1840-1930.

 Neither the new website nor the podcast is finished … but soon, very soon.

Stay tuned.

By way of introduction to our story, allow me first to mention that the Library of Congress (LOC)  recently digitized newspapers from 1832-1920 and made them freely available on the web. Chris then had the clever idea to make an improved search page for our own use, which makes it easier to find notices (advertisements, articles, etc.) in those (mostly 19th century) newspapers papers that refer to photography. And photographers. My main impetus behind this is to find references to the female photographers, since they are the focus of my current project (working title is still Photographs, Pistols and Parasols, BTW — podcast coming soon, I hope).

Anyway, while Chris and I are finding lots of tidbits that relate to my project, we also routinely stumble across intriguing items that aren’t directly related, which is where Professor Plumbe enters our story. You see, one of the newspapers we ran across had a letter to the editor that had a passionate defense of one Professor Plumbe and a gold medal that had been bestowed on him by an American daguerreotype society. The letter was written in response to a previous letter that had appeared in the paper. In the first letter, a man named J.E. Mayall had taken umbrage with an announcement that the newspaper had published saying that  Professor Plumbe had received that medal at a particular conference. Mayall argued that Plumbe had in fact not been awarded a gold — or any other — medal. He further implied that Plumbe was not even that good a photographer in general, but just someone prone to exaggerate his achievements.

But the “defense” response, written on Plumbe’s behalf, argued vigorously that Mayall was completed wrong in this matter. The defender explained that while it was true Professor Plumbe had not won the medal in a contest, he had indeed been awarded a Gold Medal by a select committee at said conference. Therefore, it was entirely true that Plumbe had received a gold medal there. The letter-writer went on to explain further that it had been the someone on  the committee [editor’s note: perhaps the letter-writer himself?] who had sent out the press notices about Plumbe’s medal. Therefore, Plumbe should be seen as entirely blameless in that issue as well.

Wow. Quite the set-down for Mayall.  Indeed, so soundly was his complaint torn apart that Mayall subsequently was compelled to write a retraction, one that included an apology to Professor Plumbe.

Such passion ignited over a photography medal, of all things?! What fun, eh? Photography has been rather racous since it’s inception, I guess. Finding that sequence of letters to the editor was just the tip of the iceberg, though, because it then  raised a bigger question:  who the heck were these people?

It turned out that Professor John Plumbe was an American photographer who opened his first daguerreotype studio, the Plumbe National Daguerrian Gallery, in Washington, DC. in 1840. Impressive – that’s only one year after Daguerre demonstrated his technology. Plumbe very quickly opened up a bunch of franchise studios all across the U.S.; some of his ads appear in that LOC newspapers online database, so it’s possible to see how big he really was throughout the 1840s.

Of course,  I’m guessing from the size of his operation that he didn’t necessarily do all his own work himself, but rather lent his name to the franchise outlets. Sort of the way Arthur Murray or Fred Astaire opened dance studios but didn’t personally teach at each one, I suppose.  In photography, it wasn’t just Plumbe who had this type of arrangement, although Plumbe seems to have been one of the first.

John J. E. Mayall, however, was a photographer of a different sort. He was an Englishman and daguerreotypist who moved to the U.S. in 1842. He subsequently opened a daguerreotype studio in Philadelphia, and I get a sense from what little I’ve read that he was more of an “artist” type of photographer, doing his own work, both in and out of the studio. Plumbe had a studio on the same street in Philadelphia as Mayall,  and I can only speculate how intensely Mayall might have resented Plumbe’s success and popularity, as it would seem that Mayall may have struggled for recognition during his time in Philadelphia.

That’s all to say that it’s interesting to conjecture about what happened after those letters appeared in the paper in 1846. I mean, I can’t prove any actual cause/effect here … but it is interesting to note that Mayall actually sold off his Philadelphia studio in 1846 and moved back to England. Perhaps there was too much public shaming after the kerfuffle about his criticism of Plumbe’s medal? Did that do in Mayall’s Philadelphia business? We may never know …

But we don’t need to feel too sorry for Mayall in the end. After getting back to England, he set up a studio in London, and in the 1850s his print-photography work garnered great acclaim. According to Wikipedia, he even became the first-ever royal photographer, for Queen Victoria and her family.

There’s also a curious item I found in an 1887 newspaper that notes that Mayall had discovered a process for doing color photography. That’s intriguing, as it’s the only mention of it I’ve found. Mayall is not the one traditionally credited for inventing color photography, which isn’t said to have been done until closer to 1900 in any case. That’s fodder for a future Monday Mystery topic, perhaps.

As for Professor Plumbe, well, he operated his extensive studio franchise only until 1848, when he sold them off and turned to working with the railroad. It’s apparently unclear if he ever did photography again.

But from 1840-47, if you wanted to get your photo taken in Washington, DC., you’d probably have headed to the Plumbe National Daguerrian Gallery in the Concert Hall building.

Yes, that means you would get your photo done by Professor Plumbe — in the Concert Hall — with the camera.

Come to think of it, I guess our intriguing little Monday Mystery does sound a bit like a game of Clue.

But in the meantime, I have managed to put together a couple of things for my Photographs, Pistols, and Parasols project.  Specifically, I’m working on creating a podcast, and I really would like to get some feedback on the idea.

Photographs, Pistols, and Parasols

BTW, for those who haven’t ever listened to any, podcasts are audio recordings, often done by one person, but also offered by radio stations. You can subscribe to podcasts through iTunes and some other services. Usually a podcast doesn’t have any associated photo or video that goes along with it – the audio should stand on its own.  So, I’m experimenting with an idea:  have a podcast episode that tells a story about a photographer and one or two of her photos, and then refer people back my website for them to see the photo(s).

Here’s a general text-only page about the podcast as a concept: http://www.clfoto.net/p3podcast/

Below is a sample episode you can play on this page (to mimic the idea of getting the podcast from someplace other than on my website, e.g. eventually it would be on iTunes or someplace like that):

And here’s the associated webpage for that episode to see the photo (note that the address in the audio will not currently get you to this page, as I haven’t made it completely public;  you’ll have to click below to get to the episode page):

http://www.clfoto.net/p3podcast/episode-003-lasting-impress.html

Ignore the fact that’s it’s labelled Episode 003 – due to technical issues it’s currently the only sample that’s available.

As I said, I’d appreciate feedback on the idea and the sample episode (you can either leave comments here or email me privately). I’d hoped to have more samples by now to share, but those darn technical issues have gotten in the way. But hopefully you’ll get the basic idea of the podcast from this one sample, at least enough to give me a little feedback on the idea of listening to a story about a photo (and a photographer) and then going somewhere else to see the photo and get more information.

However, we got a bit sidetracked before going to the Maxwell, as I had an appointment with the curator of a photo archive at a different museum in Albuquerque. It all came together rather suddenly. You see, I had visited photo archives while we Santa Fe, part of my current quest to track down American women photographers from 1850-1920 for a book I’m planning to write.

Before you ask — yes, it’s true that women really were doing photography as early as 1850. As it turns out,  there were a fair number of women who ran successful photography studios in mid-to-late 1800s, in addition to “talented amateurs” who took up photography as a serious hobby. It’s just no one every talks about these women much, and  few people know about them. Even some photo archivists I have talked with, if they don’t happen to have any examples in their archive, doubt that there were women doing photography this early. But it’s true – there were.

Anyway, while we were in Santa Fe, I visited the Palace of the Governors Photo Archive (POGPA). From the archivists there, I got the names of several women who were active in the area during my time period, and there are photos by these women in the archives there.

But there was a bit of a mystery there, too. You see, there was a poster was on display of a photo of a woman advertising  a photography studio:

Advertisement for Cobb’s Studio (photo courtesy of  the Albuquerque City Museum Photo Archives)

I had just learned (from the staff) that Cobb’s studio was run by a husband and wife team, William and Eddie Cobb.  Eddie Ross was a photographer in her own right, having worked for another photography studio in town (also run by a woman!) before she married a rival studio owner, William Cobb.  Anyway, it seemed clear to the staff at POGPA that the man with the camera on the banner was William Cobb, and they suspected that the woman was Eddie Cobb herself.  But oddly,  no one at POGPA seemed to know where the photo had come from, nor how to find the original photo.  The POGPA curator did finally give me contact information for his counterpart at a museum in Albuquerque, so I fired off an email to that man at the Albuquerque museum just after we got to town late in the day on Monday.

10 minutes later my phone rings — it’s the guy in Albuquerque calling me to follow-up! He explains that he is actually not sure about what the story is with that particular photo, as he’s not familiar with it either. But he promises to have an answer by 10am the next morning if I can stop by then.

So the next day,  by the time we get there, sure enough he has managed to track down the photo, which turns out to be in his archives, but neither digitized nor completely catalogued yet. He’s puzzled how POGPA came to have a poster-sized enlargement on the wall next to the curator’s desk in Santa Fe, but at least he’s tracked down the photo.  He’s also got information that indicates that the photos pinned to the the woman’s dress are photos of Eddie and William’s children.

Plus he pulls out a few other photos for me to look at while I’m there by Eddie Cobb and the woman she worked for before she got married, and shows me a tiny part of an exhibit at the museum about the Cobb Studio. A fun and productive morning, all set in motion by the mystery about the photo.

But the story doesn’t end there. Later that night, while searching the Internet, I happened across a notice of periodic lectures in Albuquerque given by a women who is the former photo curator of that same museum. Her lectures are all about the exact women I was researching at the POGPA and in Albuquerque. Chris and I weren’t able to find an email address for her that night, so Chris looked in the phone book (online) and found a phone number for a woman by the same name in town. The next morning before we leave town I take a chance and call the number. Yup, it’s the right woman!  During my conversation with her, it becomes clear to me that a) the man at the museum in Albuquerque has already told her all about me, including my name  b) she was the one who knew what that “mystery” photo was and c) she probably told him how to find it in the archives to show me. What a great resource she will be going forward, too – what fun to find her!

Anyway, that’s an example of how interesting and an unexpected this search for early American women photographers from 1850-1920 has been so far.  The hunt continues … with the hope for this amount serendipity to continue along the way.

In the current “Dark Fields of the Republic” exhibition at the NPG about Gardner’s photographs. He was an accomplished photographer who was noted for his photographs of battlefields and soldiers during the Civil War.  Here’s a description from the exhibition’s website:

Alexander Gardner created dramatic and vivid photographs of battlefields, which included images of the recently dead. These shocking Civil War-era images continue to haunt the national imagination. After the war, Gardner went west, creating unforgettable pictures of western landscape and portraits of American Indians.  …
— from http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/exhgardner.html

The exhibition is an interesting retrospective of the works by Gardner. He was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite photographer.  Of the many portraits that Gardner took of Lincoln, one taken shortly before Lincoln’s death gets a special mention. It’s considered his Gardner’s masterwork:

[Gardner’s] best-known work, the museum’s “cracked-plate” photograph of Lincoln, will be on view for this exhibition. The sitting on Feb. 5, 1865, took place mere weeks before Lincoln’s assassination in April. The glass plate cracked, and Gardner created only one print before throwing the plate away.  — from http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/exhgardner.html 

Gardiner’s portrait of Lincoln from broken glass plate (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

How many times did Gardner kick himself later for tossing that broken plate after he made that print, eh? But of course, he had no way of knowing it would be last portrait sitting that Lincoln would ever do.

For me, though, the most interesting work on display was actually a huge glass plate negative of another portrait of Lincoln. Here’s a version of a print made from it (thanks to Chris for finding this online):

Gardner Lincoln portrait – print from large glass plate negative

Viewing the negative in person was amazing. The photo is magnificent: the clarity of it and the details were astonishing. Combined with the size of it (maybe 12×16 or bigger, I don’t remember exactly) it was an outstanding example of the photo technology of the time period, and indeed anytime period.

Now Gardner was an acknowledged expert in that wet plate style of photography. It was not an easy thing to get right: you needed to mix a chemical mixture just so and then apply it evenly  to a glass plate. Then, you had a very small window of opportunity to take the photo – and then an equally small time-frame in which to get it developed. Gardner is rightly celebrated for his mastery of that technique for his work.

So our mystery today about Gardner isn’t about his photography. Rather, it stems from this rather abrupt remark at the end of the exhibit:

A modern warning?

Hardly.  This problem has apparently been around since the start of snapshot camera technology.

Now back when people started doing photography in the mid-1800s, using a camera required lugging a huge heavy box and a bunch of glass plates in order to take a photo. You needed to know a fair bit about chemistry as well, as the chemicals needed to be properly mixed and carefully applied to the glass plate before you exposed the image. Running around taking candid shots with that equipment just wasn’t practical, let along feasible.

But then in 1888 the Kodak camera came along and the snapshot revolution was on. The Kodak camera was  lighter-weight, self-contained, and easy to use. All you needed to know was how to press a button; indeed, the slogan went, “You press the button, we do the rest.” The Kodak camera was pre-loaded with film; when you finished the roll, you sent the whole thing into the company and they sent back the prints and a new roll of film in the camera.

Suddenly, taking a spontaneous photo to record a moment of your life, or taking a candid photo of others, was possible. Lots of people starting doing it  — including, apparently, enough of them in Hartford in 1888 to prompt this warning in the paper, repeated in an issues of the Indianpolis Journal:

From the Indianapolis Journal, August 5, 1888 (click to read the whole page of the paper)

Think of what the writer would make of today’s small cell phones with cameras  – so small, you can conceal it in the palm of your hand. No cigar box or prize package required.

Beware.