Born in 1858, Dr. Oliver Whipple Huntington took degrees at Harvard, studied at The Sorbonne in Paris, traveled extensively in Europe, Egypt and the Middle East and founded the Cloyne House School in Newport, Rhode Island in 1896, a private boarding school for boys. An instructor in mineralogy who taught at Harvard from 1882-1893, Huntington wrote on meteorites, metallurgy and chemistry and for our purposes here: was a member of the New York Camera Club, Royal Camera Club, Boston Camera Club, and New York Arts Club. Married to Newport’s Mary Ellen Balch in 1887, Huntington died in 1924. 1.

A surviving exhibition record of Huntington comments on the general state of photographic portraiture in 1895 and his own efforts:

“The New York Camera Club held its annual exhibition of photographs by members. Considering the possibilities of the camera, such an exhibition as this cannot be viewed with much satisfaction or as showing any advancement. The majority of the photographs exhibited were what one would naturally expect the camera to make with a little assistance from the photographer, but only in a few instances was it evident that the photographer and not the camera had produced the picture. A large number of portraits was shown, good, bad, and indifferent, chiefly the last named. Why it is that amateurs will apparently take the professional studio portrait as their guide and endeavor to imitate it we fail to understand. Some notable exceptions to this were the portraits of Dr. O. W. Huntington (although this gentleman occasionally erred in the opposite direction by acute eccentricity);…” 2.

1.  Huntington biography: Who’s Who in America: 1906-1907 p. 907

2.  The Photographic Times: 1895 : June: p. 377