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The James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art just lately held an exhibit celebrating the work of acclaimed photographer and ethnologist Edward S. Curtis, finest identified for his monumental early 20th-century publication, The North American Indian, a photographic documentation of indigenous Americans which took 23 years to finish.
He employed many photographic methods and processes together with photogravure, cyanotypes, platinum prints, silver bromide border print and sepia firming.
Curtis can be identified for his gold-tone images printed on glass and backed with a liquid gold wash. While he didn’t invent the method, he was one of many first to experiment with it and ideal it. He took the freedom of calling the method “Curt-Tones.” The liquid wash was composed of powered gold pigment and usually banana oil.
While Curtis was photographing for the North American Indian sequence there was a far much less celebrated photographer in St. Petersburg, Florida. His title was Esmond Grenard “E.G.” Barnhill. Born in 1894 in South Carolina, however raised in Georgia, he later relocated to Palm Beach, the place he apprenticed as a photographer.
Barnhill arrived in St. Petersburg about 1913. After just a few years he opened the Florida Photo Studio at 17 Third Street North. He started by processing movie, particularly for vacationers, and promoting cameras and different photograph provides. Barnhill additionally photographed notable scenes and landmarks in regards to the metropolis, and finally had these reproduced as prints, postcards and paintings. He took photographs of metropolis points of interest, such because the annual Festival of the States Parade. According to his son Jack, he bought Festival 8×10 shiny photograph prints to vacationers “by the thousands.”
As a youth, Barnhill made household journeys to the west, sojourns he continued after arriving in St. Pete. In 1916 he made a visit to Alaska.
Barnhill biographer and nice arts and images authority Gary Monroe, in his e book E. G. Barnhill: Florida Photographer, Adventurer, Entrepreneur, notes that “it is entirely possible that Barnhill first became familiar with (Edward) Curtis’s artistic practices during this 1916 trip …” It is thought that Curtis was touring extensively within the west in early 1916, and was additionally in Seattle, the place his dwelling and studio had been positioned.
Barnhill continued his journeys west all through the Twenties and later. In addition to his occupation as a photographer, he grew to become an entrepreneur creating Indian buying and selling posts, curio outlets and points of interest. In 1925 he opened buying and selling posts in Gallup, New Mexico, and Estes Park, Colorado, which he operated in the course of the St. Pete low season. Later, in 1931, he opened a buying and selling submit in Boulder City, Nevada, the place the Boulder Dam was underneath development (attracting uncommon vacationers in the course of the Nineteen Thirties Great Depression).
There he marketed himself as each an Indian dealer and a photographer. Monroe experiences he bought Navajo, Zuni, Hopi, and Seminole handcrafts whereas additionally photographing development of the dam. Still later he opened Indian curio and vacationer outlets in Ft. Lauderdale, Palm Bay, and Kissimmee, Florida, and in Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine and Georgia. Some of those he continued to function till 1959.
Barnhill additionally operated an “Indian Trading Post” on the first St. Petersburg Municipal Pier (the “Million Dollar Pier”). On one event he enlisted Seminole Indians, together with Chiefs Ben Tommy and Robert Osceola, to come back to his Trading Post to carry out “native dances and tribal rituals.”
Barnhill’s deal with Indian-associated enterprise ventures even prolonged to his St. Pete images studio. In 1933 the title of Barnhill’s studio was modified to “Barnhill’s Camera Shop and Indian Store.”
Before the introduction of Kodachrome transparency movie in 1935, photographers experimented with numerous methods of coloring black and white movie prints. Color pigments had been utilized to the black and white photograph. Barnhill was the primary to supply this service within the St. Petersburg space. Later he utilized the identical method to black and white postcards, which he bought for 5 cents. His use of a particular New York Albertype printing course of additional added to the refinement of his postcards.
Eventually he started hand-painting his personal photographs. In 1933 Barnhill entered six of his scenic Florida photographic pictures within the Second International Photographic Exhibition in Vienna, Austria. His {photograph} “When the Clouds Go Drifting By” was awarded a prize for the “technique shown and the fine pictorial work.”
“The subtle richness of Barnhill’s airbrushed-tinted photographs captured Florida’s distinctly clear, brisk colors,” Monroe noticed. “At times his dashes of brushed on highlights approached the neon colors that might be seen at sunset … Barnhill created pictures that functioned … as windows through which to see the real Florida.”
E.G. Barnhill, (American, 1894-1987), Florida Sunset on Tampa Bay at St. Petersburg Fla., c. 1914
Gold toned gelatin silver glass plate with uranium dye, The Gary Monroe Family Collection.
According to Monroe, Barnhill’s conventional and hand-colored photos on paper established him as one among Florida’s excellent photographers throughout his period. However, Barnhill’s most notable contribution to images is alleged to be the usage of uranium relatively than gold pigment, to copy Curtis’s glass print course of.
According to Julie A. Wilson, former Director of Marketing and Communications for the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, “He later sourced his supplies directly from Germany, before anyone understood the element’s radioactive potential. Falling somewhere between photography and vernacular art, these ‘glowing’ works combine ethereal beauty with Barnhill’s unique sense of showmanship.”
(The Museum of Fine Arts featured GLOW, an exhibit of Barnhill’s works, in 2019. “I believe the glass plates are the epitome of his work and hold a special place in Florida art,” Monroe informed the Catalyst on the time. “And they are worthy in the national dialog of photography.”)
Barnhill wished to make use of colours apart from the gold wash utilized by Curtis for his glass pictures. He tried various pigments and at last found that uranium dyes would obtain the look he wished. As Monroe recounts, Barnhill had gone to Germany to check lithography earlier than settling in St. Pete. He additionally had an curiosity in minerology and will have change into accustomed to uranium whereas there. (In 1929 the St. Petersburg Times reported that Barnhill left the town for Germany to check new processes in colour images, and that he would additionally “make an extensive study of Hertzian waves and the science of analyzing measurements from [an] electric mineral calculator for locating minerals under ground.”) Also, given his information of Native Americans he could have identified they used uranium to create paints for ceremonial ornament.
While there have been many photographers who helped promote St. Petersburg in its youth, Barnhill did so with a particular sense of photographic information and artistry. Both his glass pictures and colorized postcards have change into particular collectors’ imagery to many who recognize our metropolis’s distinctive historical past and sense of place.
Esmond G. Barnhill died in Gainesville, Florida in 1987, on the age of 93.
A model of this text was first printed within the Northeast Journal.
Will Michaels is former director and trustee of the St. Petersburg Museum of History, and the writer of The Making of St. Petersburg and the Hidden History of St. Petersburg. He could also be reached at wmichaels2222@gmail.com.