This  collection of 32 mounted gum bichromate photographs showing the beauty of the Hawaiian islands circa 1900-1910 were believed to have been taken by California photographer William Worden, (1868-1946) based on the final known 1904 image by him of a rain-slicked Market Street “Grand illumination” view which celebrated the encampment of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows that year.  More scholarship needs to be done for the Worden attribution, with the following being my original 2012 post for the album.

You can see all of the album photographs here, as well as my post from 2011.

Album Particulars

The majority of the photographs are believed to have been taken in Hawaii, (known as the Hawaiian Territory at the time) although one photograph, the last presented with the album, shows a nighttime view of Market street in San Francisco, California. Based on other surviving photographs from this era, it depicts the Grand illumination of Market which took place in conjunction with the Sovereign Grand Lodge of the United States and Canadian encampment of Independent Order of Odd Fellows which officially took place in that city from September 19-24, 1904. (1.) Another photograph, appropriately printed in a green tint, shows a stand of Redwood trees, probably taken in California. One subtle clue from the album indicates the photographer may have been a member of the U.S. military based in Honolulu between 1900 and 1920.

The curious and intriguing evidence for this is one of the album leaf supports. On it is a mounted photograph showing the famous volcanic tuff cone Diamond Head on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. On the verso is printed:
War Department
| Headquarters Hawaiian Department |
Honolulu, H.T.
| ——————————-
Official Business

Evidently a mailing envelope, a red ink stamp is used to address its recipient, which is unfortunately mostly rubbed out, except for a few details which can still be gleaned:
Commanding Officer |
Th
| Honolulu

In trying to date this envelope, we note the term Hawaiian Department in relation to the U.S. military did not come into general use until February 15, 1913, when it superseded the term Department of Hawaii. 2.
Taking this further, but of course with no evidence he was the album’s photographer, cursory research turns up a listing for the Commanding Officer, Major Thomas J. Smith, who around this time headed up the Hawaii Ordnance Depot for the U.S. Army in Honolulu in 1917. 3.

Other than the tell-tale geologic profile of Diamond Head which can be seen in several landscapes in the album, other identified locations for photographs include Moanalua Park and Sacred Falls on the island of Oahu. The present-day Liliuokalani Park and Gardens on Hawaii Island and Foster Botanical Garden in Honolulu-all places existing in the first decade of the 20th century, may be the location for other album photographs. Of course, with the inclusion of the Market street photograph, the well known Japanese tea garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park cannot be ruled out as a possible location as well. Among the carefully composed studies, album photographs show Japanese gardens, an interior study of a tea house, a wooden footbridge, stone lanterns, and large Poinciana tree. Other studies include a rice paddy, taro patch and still life of a vase of Sun-lit flowers.

Surviving examples of Hawaiian artistic photography from the period before World War I or earlier not purely topographical in nature are considered rare. But that is not to say there wasn’t an interest in amateur photography in the Hawaiian Islands at this time. In 1889, the well-known photographer Christian Jacob Hedemann (1852–1932) became president of a group of amateur photographers who founded the Hawaiian Camera Club in Honolulu that year. The Photographic Times reported:

“There are about fifty amateurs in the Hawaiian Islands, which ought to be enough material to make the organization prosperous and useful. The public has an interest in it, as one function assumed by the Camera Club is the holding of exhibitions.” 4.

Later, in 1907, the newly formed Hawaiian Photographic Society was also founded:

“The Hawaiian Photographic Society was formed at Honolulu, H. T., in May, most of the enthusiastic amateurs of that city being present to aid in its formation. A notable work to be undertaken by the society is the securing of photographs of the places of historic interest on the island and placing these in the Hall of Archives as the basis for a photographic survey.” 5.

On a provenance note, the album was purchased in 2011 from a former owner in the Midwestern United States.  Additional insight into this album is welcomed.

NOTES:

1. CALIFORNIA HISTORIAN JOHN T. FREEMAN: EMAIL CORRESPONDENCE WITH PHOTOSEED SITE OWNER ALONG WITH CORROBORATION OF FRONT PAGE ARTICLES AND GRAPHICS FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO CALL NEWSPAPER EDITIONS OF SEPTEMBER 19-20, 1904 AS RETRIEVED VIA THE CALIFORNIA DIGITAL NEWSPAPER COLLECTION: JANUARY, 2012 2. FROM: WAR DEPARTMENT- ANNUAL REPORTS, 1913: WASHINGTON: GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1914: P. 95 3. FROM: HAWAIIAN ALMANAC AND YEARBOOK FOR 1918: THOMAS G. THRUM: COMPILER AND PUBLISHER: HONOLULU: 1917: P. 169 4. THE PHOTOGRAPHIC TIMES AND AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER: W.I. ADAMS, EDITOR: THE PHOTOGRAPHIC TIMES PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION: NEW YORK: FEBRUARY 8, 1889: P. 74 5. NOTES AND COMMENT: IN: THE PHOTO-MINIATURE: EDITED BY JOHN A. TENNANT: VOLUME 7, APRIL, 1907:  P. 408

 The inevitable yet sad news today of the Eastman Kodak Company’s filing for bankruptcy protection in the court of the Southern District of New York state did not come as a surprise to those of us who have been paying attention to the company’s mounting woes over the past several decades. However, what is more shocking to me is how the once ubiquitous Kodak brand no longer figures in any cultural discourse as it pertains to amateur photography considering its formerly ubiquitous place in that very culture.

Alfred Stieglitz might have used up part of his 15 minutes of fame, to quote another artist provocateur, by railing against the culture of a company that promised to do the rest after you pressed their many shutter buttons, but even he could certainly not deny the value and cumulative effect all those hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of little yellow boxes containing treasures not yet exposed had when opened by the masses. The bicycle craze be damned you say? Without naming names, I know for a fact more than a few caught opening up one of those many Kodak boxes on a weekend trip to the country or simply photographing the amorphous shapes of pots and pans in their own sink using Kodak film who went on to became  famous or infamous photographers in their own right. Their efforts have contributed much to the history of Photography and even changed-and continue to do so- the perception of visual ideas by way of a camera lens-using a Kodak or some other brand.

And if you will pardon my own rant for only a moment, a little historical background please, if only to diffuse some of the screeds I’ve been reading lately upon said company’s demise-for it is still a remarkable achievement- and rare-that an enterprise such as Kodak has been able to survive for 131 years, even in bankruptcy reorganization.

The founder, George Eastman, (1854-1932) surely had his faults. If you care to read, as I have been, Elizabeth Brayer’s important and exhaustive biography of Eastman first published in 1996, you will find however that they were abundantly balanced with a philanthropy not exercised enough in modern times. You will learn Eastman was anti-union and ran a company whose tentacles reached around the world to defend Kodak patents to the point of stifling innovation. And if that didn’t work out, he would just offer up a mountain of cash in order to buy out the other guy in route to creating and maintaining a monopoly of those yellow boxes as well as the manufacturer of the very cameras using the gelatinous rolled film found inside of them.

Eastman, a man of the gilded age who harnessed the sweat of America’s Industrial Revolution for fantastic riches, also gave back-enough so in my opinion to become basis as unwitting poster child to the very idea behind the formation of an American middle class. As chronicled in Brayer’s volume, Eastman in the guise of the anonymous “Mr. Smith”, gave upwards of 20 million dollars in his lifetime-almost single handedly building the fledgling Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from the ground up. But he also donated millions more to the children and citizens of his very own Rochester in the form of brand new dental clinics. How do scores, let alone successive generations, put a long-term value on both brains and good teeth?

For myself, Kodak was most definitely alive and bigger than life as I walked into Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal as a kid in the late 1960’s and marveled at their magnificent Colorama displays. For those indelible images, courtesy of Kodak and a healthy dose of Life magazine, I’ll say thanks and count myself a photographer forever. In regards to my recent trek through Grand Central, the ubiquity of another brand-Apple, now holds court where those giant transparencies formerly shown bright. Genius Bar indeed.

In light of this recent bankruptcy news and its effect on those separate but linked entities of the Kodak company itself- the city of Rochester as well as the guardian, research institution and public display facility extraordinaire to the history of Photography- the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film– my message is, please carry on. And to all those affiliated or working in both places, let me apologize for Mr. Eastman just this once and say chin up, your work is most definitely not done, and hopefully never will be.

Is logical. And I’ll tell you why. Because the Boraxologist told me so. How else to explain the 1906 publication of a small book featuring the work of American Photo-Secession founder members Clarence White and Gertrude Käsebier as a way to convince folks to open new savings accounts at a bank in Rochester, New York?

I’m guessing you have no clue what I’m talking about, but if you happened to be alive in 1904 and flipping through your daily newspaper, chances are good you might have encountered a drawing of a wise old mule-named the Boraxologist—lauding the untold benefits of “20-Mule Team Brand Borax”—a water-softening agent used in the laundry. Today, Borax® is best known as a laundry “booster” and multi-purpose household cleaner. But thanks to the sayings of this mule a century ago, you may have believed the Fountain of Youth and Holy Grail were cleverly disguised in a box—humbly biding time on the general store shelf, awaiting your purchase to give new life to  dirty clothes.

The mind that came up with the mule with the funny sounding name and that little book from the bank was from a gentleman by the name of Otis H. Kean. A book publisher and advertising agent by profession, Kean turned creeds and in his own words, “optimistic aphorisms” into advertising copy by the barrel. “Such things seem to please the people” he said in 1904, regarding his “wisdom” dished out as part of the borax campaign. While reading through much of his published copy in preparation for this post, the modern figure of Don Draper did cross my mind, but of course from the “kinder and gentler” era of the early 20th century. I have no doubt if Kean was given a client’s account with the challenge of selling the benefits of more snow to a group of Eskimos, he would have no hesitation with the challenge. In carrying this mindset forward, Kean’s contact with cutting edge artistic photography by Clarence White and Gertrude Käsebier was simply the opportunity to consummate a marriage: photographs as visual aphorisms if you will.  Why just confine their work to a gallery he may have thought, when it could be the perfect foil in promoting the virtues of opening a new savings account at the just opened Rochester Trust & Safe Deposit Company’s new building?

Boraxologically speaking, how exactly did Mr. Kean persuade or convince this aforementioned gallery owner, none other than Alfred Stieglitz himself, that using White’s and Käsebier’s work was in his best interest? A moot point perhaps, because Kean succeeded in issuing this tiny book, titling it “Homespun Essays—Everyday Thoughts About Everyday Life”, which featured their work. Of course, their encounter may never have happened, but if it did, a conversation between this wisdom spouting advertising man and fierce guardian of the American Photo-Secession would have been amusing to say the least.

My own take on Kean while preparing Homespun Essays for this site is this: a perfectionist with a heart. The specialized books he published in conjunction with his business concern, the Literary Print Shop, were high-class productions and in this regard, his possible saving grace in relation to any possible dealings he may have had with Stieglitz. It wasn’t as if he was opposed to all commerce of course, but you do have to consider Stieglitz was most definitely an anomaly in the gallery world when and if Kean crossed his threshold in pursuit of “business”. This is because his well documented and self-prescribed “fight” for photography in America took the form of fierce protector and champion of White’s and Käsebier’s photography at a time when the very concept of hanging artistic photographs on gallery walls was in itself a revolutionary act. Kean’s involvement with fine printing and his possible business relationship with the Quadri-Color Printing Company in New York City—a firm responsible for the first true, four-color printing in America beginning in 1904, would have also given both a healthy respect for each other and a way to start a meaningful conversation.

Please visit our latest opus on Homespun Essays here, and prepare yourself to be “homespun” if you decide to read the posted essays along with the photographs, where you may smile and even laugh, especially after digesting this following tidbit from the book’s publisher: “The Trust Company never dies, never absconds and is immune from those possibilities of loss that may happen to every individual.” But then again, don’t cry too much when you find out they actually paid 4% interest back then on a savings account.

I’ll admit to never having stepped foot on any Hawaiian island, but I did “drive” a few roads in Honolulu recently thanks to Google’s Street View feature, all for the sake of checking out the topography near Maunalua Park, its proximity to Fort Shafter; the island’s oldest military base nearby, and the more distant city of Honolulu itself, an approximate 11 minute trip according to its algorithmic brain trust.

My reasoning for this is the newest addition to this site, an album of gorgeous gum bichromate photographs circa 1900-1910 I’m calling Hawaiian Landscape | Japanese Garden Album, possibly taken by a very gifted amateur photographer who called senior Army headquarters in Honolulu home. What made me pursue this research path?  Since no attribution or even titles to the photographs exist in the album, I could only rely on the one clue left in it: a single photographic support stamped “Official Business” evidently used as a mailing envelope.

On the back of it is a return address for the United States War Department, based in Honolulu, further known as Headquarters Hawaiian Department. The other clue was the envelope’s addressed recipient. And this is where the trail gets really maddening, because it is mostly deliberately rubbed out. Just enough to fail any military censor but enough for me to figure out it was addressed to a Commanding Officer, also based in Honolulu. More online checking showed the term Hawaiian Department didn’t come into official use until early in 1913, which then presented another conundrum: the final mounted photograph in the album shows a nighttime view of San Francisco’s Market Street during the September, 1904 encampment of the Sovereign Grand Lodge of the United States and Canadian Independent Order of Odd Fellows. 

But photographic archeology can be my peccadillo sometimes. In revisiting “the envelope”, I of course could not leave well enough alone. I went ahead and searched for a Commanding Officer whose first name was Thomas, the name that seems to make sense to my feeble gray matter since the sole letters “Th” appear under the Commanding Officer recipient address stamped on it. The name of Major Thomas J. Smith, who headed the Hawaii Ordnance Depot for the U.S. Army in Honolulu in 1917 was a lone result that turned up, placing it farther away from the working 1900-1910 dates I’ve assigned this album based on the final 1904 image included in it. In that case, I or anyone else may never know who took these lovely- and in the case of surviving artistic photographs from the Hawaiian Islands at the turn of the 20th century- very uncommon and rare photographs.

But the real-life photographer in me does want to give someone credit for them. Were the photographs assembled for the album after the person left military service, if they were ever enlisted in the first place? In that case, the photographer simply re-purposed an old piece of correspondence-addressed to himself or someone else- to throw everyone-and especially yours truly- off his or her trail.

So Aloha to your memory anyway, whomever you are.  And thanks for this record of Hawaii from a place lost in time. If desired, please visit here to begin your Hawaiian vacation.

2012 will mark a century since a lovely collection of photographs of Italy were taken and assembled into a personal, miniature Grand Tour type album recently added to our collection here at PhotoSeed. As photographs, I feel they stand on their own strong merits but alas, an elusive missing piece for posterity is a record of their maker.  Stamped on the cover is the simple title of its’ contents: Jtalien 1912 (Italy 1912).  After purchasing it from a gentleman in Holland several years ago, I quickly deduced the photos were of German origin.

In this regard, language was the clue. Other German material in our archive contains this early spelling for Italy in the German language as well as Italian using the capitol letter “J” instead of an I: Jtalien and Jtalienische. But what sealed the deal for me was the curious addition to the album in the form of a later mounted snapshot of a group of 12 men wearing military clothing. A small sign propped up in front of them states “1914 Feldzug 1915”.

From this photograph I determined they are wearing World War I issue,  Imperial German Army uniforms.  “Feldzug” further translates to “Campaign” in German.  I’m no military expert, but these guys don’t exactly look like they have just returned from the front lines. Instead, they are smiling, one holds a cigar, and another bearded soldier propped up in the back row poses for the camera while placing his hands on the shoulders of his comrades. Two women flank the group and appear to be nurses of some kind. A military hospital setting?  Or perhaps soldiers on an extended R&R assignment?  Is the same elusive photographer responsible for the marvelous images in this album sitting among them? And why not the possibilty one of the nurses could actually be our photographer? How did this album end up in the Netherlands, which remained neutral during The Great War?  For these questions I have no answers at the moment, just more questions.

Another potential clue to the album’s familial origin is the inclusion of a photograph of two women sitting side-saddle on horses. They may only be part of a larger party connected with the album’s fox hunt gathering photographs or merely a separate moment of repose while they take a pleasure ride in another location.

My own hunch is the woman looking directly into the camera on horseback is the same woman shown in a separate album photograph. In it, she presents several gifts-a bottle of wine (?) and clutch of flowers to a group of Italian village children, several barefoot. But again, deductions, not facts.

What I can say conclusively about the album’s 60 or so mounted photographs is they are a visual delight and important record of Italy before the outbreak of World War I. Some of the images are strikingly beautiful: the Italian countryside in particular but also of subject matter one rarely sees in “typical” Grand Tour type albums (not the commercial or snapshot variety) : carefully framed and presented images of dirt roads, life in a back alley,  a woman in bonnet caught unawares while most likely harvesting mussels at the seashore, a mysterious detail of a gate affixed with several crosses as well as many of the country’s famous landmarks and important Roman Catholic churches.

These photographs are not topographical records but instead are done with a pronounced pictorialist aesthetic. Printed in multiple colors (ozobrome-a transfer pigment process-may be a hunch for some) and mounted on colored supports-they are individual jewels waiting for your own critical eye. Please follow this link to make your own Italian pilgrimage to the past.