Welcome to the second of my series of posts on Researching Photographers Working in the South. There is a good reason to become familiar with these sources. We must continue to seek the facts that will help to put the puzzle together – the more complete it is, the more we learn about the business of photography in our country, and beyond.

Gathering those pieces of the puzzle on a particular photographer’s life and work, I am able to add to the information gathered by other researchers, genealogists, and historians on that person. If there are gaps or inaccurate information in their work on someone, I know I can possibly help them. If they have something to tell me about a photographer’s work outside of Georgia, I am more than thrilled to hear it.

We can and should all help each other. Never be “stingy” with your information, never be a self-serving researcher. That is not what the work of the historian, professional or amateur, is all about.

Until the lists of Southern photographers now available only in hard copy are made accessible online (or whatever “online” eventually becomes), we cannot truly begin to see the overall picture. Ideally, they will all be linked, or on a single site. I do not know that this will happen in my lifetime, but it may happen in yours.

North Carolina

A good, but simple overview of photography in the state is found in the Encyclopedia of North Carolina http://ncpedia.org/visual-arts-part-5-evolution

Click on any image to enlarge

The Bridge, Connemara, Flat Rock NC, a real photo postcard by an unidentified  photographer, possibly “Fassett”, ca.1910-15; author’s collection 

An excellent book by Stephen Massengill was published on North Carolina photographers about ten years ago. This easy-to-use guide is well illustrated and fully indexed, consisting of photographers’ biographical entries in alphabetical order, an extensive bibliography, and an index. I find it really a pleasure to use this reference book.

Massengill, Stephen. Photographers in North Carolina: The First Century, 1842-1941 (NC Office of Archives & History, 2004; paperback) ISBN-10: 0865263116; ISBN -13: 978-0865263116

There is also a List of North Carolina Photographers through 1910 that I believe photo archivist Jerry Cotton compiled before he retired. It is located online on the UNC at Chapel Hill’s North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives (NCCPA) at NC Photo Archives 

Also in The North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives site are listed collections with links to their finding aids. They are listed by photographer or studio name, by process type, and by collector. Not all images are digitized but if so, they are linked. There is also a great deal of information to be gleaned from the finding aids.  N.C. Collections with Photographs

An example of a collection of work by an individual photographer on this site is the Bayard Morgan Wootten Photographic Collection, a total of 485 digital images. A favorite book of mine about her was written by Jerry W. Cotton and called Light and Air: The Photography of Bayard Wootten (UNC Press, 1998) ISBN 978-0-8078-2445-0 This is a lovely, informative publication about one of the South’s most interesting women photographers, and there were many more than you may think!

Bayard Wootten, c1914, Camp Glenn, NC; Bayard Morgan Wootten Photographic Collection (P0011), NC Collection Photographic Archives, The Wilson Library, UNC at Chapel Hill.

South Carolina

There is a nicely done guide to South Carolina’s photographers. It is well-illustrated, and indexed, but very different from Massengale’s book on North Carolina photographers. It is Harvey S. Teal’s Partners with the Sun: South Carolina Photographers, 1840-1940 (University of SC, 2001) ISBN 978-1-57003-384-1

Teal developed his book around South Carolina’s cities and towns. He discusses the photographers working there in different time periods, and in different formats, as well as separate chapters on female, African American, postcard, amateur, and stereo and panorama photographers.

I like the book, and there is a lot of very useful information in it. I refer to it often – but it can be a bit difficult to use. The index is really the best way to find a particular photographer, who will often be cited on several different pages in various sections. One must put together all the information found, jotting down notes, or adding many post-it notes throughout the book (I am so guilty of this!). There are occasional errors in the index, so be sure to check the surrounding pages if you do not find “your person” on a page cited under their name in the index.

Bird’s Eye View of the Square by Night, Spartanburg SC; Asheville Post Card Co., ca. 1945; author’s collection

The South Carolina Information Highway SC Info Highway is the gateway to several collections of digital photographs, and in some cases, more information on the photographers themselves.

For example, the Georgetown County Public Library’s Georgetown County Digital Archives http://www.gcdigital.org/cdm/  has several collections that include photographs, as well as collections of photographs, several by amateur photographers.

The Morgan-Trenholm Collection is one collection found on this site in which several local 19th and early 20th century South Carolina professional photographers are represented. In most cases you must click on the image, then on “view description” and look at the Creator tag for the photographers’ name. One of those photographers, William A. Reckling was from South Carolina, but he also worked in Rome, Georgia, for a short time before returning to his home state.

The Georgetown County Digital Archives is also an excellent source for genealogists with connections to Georgetown, Andrews, Florence, Pawley’s Island, or Murrells Inlet. Included on this site are collections with photographs taken by the aforementioned NC photographer, Bayard Wooten. The Dreamkeepers Collection, found here, documents African Americans in Georgetown County.

Various collections, including those of The South Carolina Historical Society, the Charleston County Public Library, Historic Charleston, and The Citadel are represented in The Lowcountry Digital Archives

The Pollitzer Family of South Carolina digital materials are located here, including The Anita Pollitzer Family Papers. Several photographs in this collection are by nationally known photographers, but some are by South Carolina photographers. There are links to finding aids and archives held by the various contributors.

Among other collections found here is The College of Charleston Stereoscope Views collection. These are black and white photographs of work on plantations in the states of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia. Also here is the Samuel Lord Hyde Photographs. Hyde was a photographer and amateur historian who documented the South Carolina Inter-State & West Indian Exposition, 1901-1902, while still a teenager, and photos taken 1939 during construction of Lake Moultrie.

The collections found on the LCDL site are particularly noteworthy for their images related to the Jewish families of Charleston, African American life in the South, and plantations. http://tinyurl.com/lgbt46h

There are several monographs and websites available on the better known photographers who worked in South Carolina, such as George S. Cook and George N. Barnard, and quite a lot has been written about Civil War-era photographs taken in South Carolina. If this is your interest these can be easily located. You might also be interested in my posts on George S. Cook on this blog from June 7 – 21.

There are some attractive books and websites available on those lesser known photographers who worked in South Carolina. Three of these are Richard Samuel Roberts, Alfred and Bob Willis, and Doris Ulmann.

A True Likeness: the Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920-1936, edited by Thomas L. Johnson and Philip C. Dunn (Algonquin Books, 1986) [paperback issued by Writers & Readers Publishing in 1994; ISBN-10: 0863161758, ISBN-13: 978-0863161759]. The Columbia Museum of Art held an exhibit of this African American photographer’s work in 2012, called “Our Time, Our Place.” There is a downloadable teaching kit and samples of Roberts’ photographs on their website at http://tinyurl.com/k83jjkf

Father-son photographers Alfred Tennyson and Robert H. “Bob” Willis documented Spartanburg for over eighty years. This book juxtaposes their photographs with more contemporary photos of the same place. Spartanburg Revisited: a Second Look at the Photographs of Alfred and Bob Willis, by Alfred Willis (Hub City Writers Project, 2007; paperback, ISBN-10: 1891885561 ISBN-13: 978-1891885563). The Spartanburg County Public Libraries hold two collections of images by the Willis’s you can peruse at Willis Collections

Doris Ulmann was a New York City photographer who was trained in the school of pictorialist Clarence White. She began photographing in the Southern Appalachians in 1927, and although she died less than a decade later she left some fascinating images. She not only documented the crafts of the Southern Appalachians in Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia, but she also documented African Americans in South Carolina, the Sea Islands, Coastal Alabama, and Louisiana. Among the available books on Ulmann is The Life & Photography of Dorris Ulmann, by Philip Walker Jacobs (University Press of KY, 2001). The University of Oregon holds The Doris Ullman Collection

Tennessee

Backmark of a carte-de-visite portrait by J. F. Coonley, Memphis TN; author’s collection 

There is no one volume listing nineteenth and/or early twentieth century Tennessee photographers, but there are some websites, and at least one publication citing photographers by name. There are also some nicely done digital collections featuring individual Tennessee photographers.

An older brochure with a listing of Nashville, Tennessee photographers is Recorded in Nashville: A Visual Record by the City’s Early Photographers (Metropolitan Historical Commission, 1980). This is the catalog of an exhibit held at the Parthenon, Nashville, TN in September 1980. There are about 170 individuals, partnerships, and studios listed.

A list of photographers of Giles County, Tennessee, which includes the city of Pulaski, is found at Giles County Photographers