Jaw-dropping photos in Whatcom Museum lure Ken Burns, Ralph Lauren (original) (raw)

A PHOTOGRAPHER NAMED Darius Kinsey, riding in a lightweight wagon pulled by a horse named Slim, stopped by the Pritts homestead in Nooksack, Whatcom County. Kinsey regularly traveled the Western Washington countryside seeking out subjects, and potential customers. He’d started his photography business in Snohomish in 1890, a few years earlier.

Tabitha Pritts, described by the local newspaper as “one of the most popular belles of the Nooksack Valley,” caught his eye, and he hers. Darius and Tabitha married in 1896, thus embarking on a 50-year photographic partnership, the fruits of which can be seen to this day — on calendars and book covers, in documentaries and retail stores, and as far away as Japan and Australia. Kinsey’s name is associated with photos of logging and landscapes in the same way his more famous contemporary Edward Curtis is associated with photography of Native Americans.

Thousands of images produced by Darius and Tabitha reside at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham. The collection includes prints, plus glass, nitrate and stereoscope negatives. The museum’s photo archivist, Jeff Jewell, scans the images, and they sell to commercial clients for 1/megabyte.KenBurnspaidabout1/megabyte. Ken Burns paid about 1/megabyte.KenBurnspaidabout6,000 for their use in two of his documentaries. Ralph Lauren paid about the same for Kinsey images for its stores in London and Milan. Which begs the question: Why would Ralph Lauren want photos of logging in the Pacific Northwest? “There’s a certain interest in that time period and those trees,” Jewell says. “It’s iconic and speaks to a certain place and a certain time.”

A Kinsey photo taken in 1906 of a path leading into an old-growth forest covers a wall near the entrance to the University of Washington Tacoma’s new Milgard Hall. The print is 12 feet tall and more than 14 feet wide. Processed in green and black, it serves as the backdrop for maps, documents and other Kinsey photos that tell the story of the forests of South Puget Sound.

Images of clear-cutting old-growth forests — even if made more than century ago — aren’t popular with everyone. A student leader at UW Tacoma objected to the use of a Kinsey photo in the Milgard exhibit. It shows loggers sitting in the notch of an enormous stump. Whatcom Museum visitors sometimes complain to Jewell about the Kinsey collection. “It’s like you’re showing atrocities,” he says. Jewell tries to provide context, often to no avail. “There’s no neutral documentarian mode.”

AFTER MARRYING, THE enterprising and ambitious Kinseys set up shop in Sedro-Woolley. Their house included a business office and a studio with a skylight, good lighting for making people’s portraits. Kinsey also traveled from town to town up the Skagit River Valley and beyond, setting up a tent and staying for a couple of days. The wagon pulled by Slim housed a compartment in which Kinsey stored his cameras, tripods and glass negatives.

At some point, possibly as early as 1892, he decided to venture into the woods to document logging operations and old-growth forests. He carried two, sometimes three, cameras, and his equipment totaled 150 pounds or more, and the going was tough. He navigated muddy, rutted roads in the wagon. He hiked in with a packhorse or employed helpers to haul his gear on their backs. Few went with him more than once.

He was a small, rugged man who was said to climb like a goat. Shod in caulk boots, he jumped from log to log carrying his tripod and cameras. He’d prop a ladder against a tall stump and climb up and wait, sometimes for hours, for the sun to break through the tree limbs to catch the perfect light. Later, he employed a tripod he could adjust to as high as 12 feet.

Kinsey taught Tabitha darkroom skills so he could spend more time in the field. He shipped his exposed negatives back to her; she processed them, made prints, packaged them and sent them back to the camps. The loggers paid two bits for a 6-by-8-inch unmounted print, more for larger ones. Tabitha made sure they were delivered by the next payday. Kinsey often arranged multiple subjects in the frame; the more people, the more potential orders per negative.

The Kinseys moved their operation from Sedro-Woolley to a 12-room house on East Alder Street in Seattle in 1906. It served as their home, studio and darkroom. In 1915, they cataloged their negatives and selected 240 of the best; most were 11-by-14 glass negatives. The rest were taken to Pacific Picture Frame in Seattle and destroyed, possibly as many as 10,000. Those included photos Kinsey took of children in front of schools in Whatcom, Skagit and Snohomish counties — a treasure turned to trash.

KINSEY WAS SOMETHING of a mountaineer, as was Tabitha. In July 1903, he hiked up to 8,000 feet on Mount Rainier with a helper and photographed the mountain, the Nisqually and Paradise rivers, and Reflection Lake. They were caught in a snowstorm and narrowly escaped being swept away by an avalanche. The following month, he, Tabitha, another woman and two guides set out to ascend Mount Baker. They followed a trail for 2 miles and then bushwhacked, walking along logs and over windfall. They almost made the summit, close enough to smell the sulfur from the crater, before turning back. Throughout the climb, Darius, and Tabitha, photographed the walls of snow and yawning crevasses they encountered.

As Kinsey grew older, he stopped going up mountains and into the woods, though he continued to photograph in lumber yards, shingle mills, rail yards and other places safer and easier to access. He stopped photographing in 1940, possibly after a fall from a stump, ending his half-century photographic odyssey. He died in 1945.

JESSE EBERT, A Seattle freelance photographer, bought the Kinsey collection from Tabitha the following year, and it attracted wider attention under Ebert’s watch. Kinsey was included in a 1963 exhibition, “The Photographer and the American Landscape,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Of the 19 photographers included in the show, only six had practiced before the turn of the 20th century. In addition to Kinsey, they included photography legends Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz — heady company for a shy photographer from America’s Fourth Corner.

Ebert decided to sell in 1952. Much haggling ensued with potential buyers, but nothing came of it. A timber company decided against buying, noting the collection wouldn’t do much for its corporate image. Ebert offered Yale University the collection at 3pernegative.Thatprovedtoohigh,sohedroppedthepriceto3 per negative. That proved too high, so he dropped the price to 3pernegative.Thatprovedtoohigh,sohedroppedthepriceto1.47 per negative. Yale sent a team of four experts to examine the collection, and two of the four said it had no historical value.

In 1971, Dave Bohn, a teacher, photographer and author in Berkeley, California, saw a Seattle magazine story about Kinsey. It noted that Ebert was looking for a buyer. Bohn always wanted to contribute to the history of photography in some way, and he thought this could be his chance.

Bohn spent three hours at Ebert’s studio examining the collection. He was astonished by the technical quality of the negatives, the history they documented and Kinsey’s eye for composition. Considering that much of the work was done in the deep and dark woods, Bohn found it hardly believable. “I realized I was standing in front of a visual gold mine,” he says. “I don’t mean in terms of money. I mean a visual gold mine. This was it.”

Bohn paid Ebert’s asking price of $8,000. There was no haggling. He rented a Ford Econoline van and drove from Berkeley to Seattle to pick up the collection. It numbered 4,500 images — different size glass negatives, stereoscope and nitrate negatives, prints and more.

Bohn partnered with Rodolfo Petschek, a friend and photographer, and they produced a two-volume history of the Kinseys. It took them seven years to complete. Bohn wrote the text, and Petschek printed the photos. An oversized single volume, titled “Kinsey Photographer,” runs to more than 300 pages and includes dozens of photos.

In researching the book, they interviewed the Kinseys’ two children, Dorothea and Darius Jr., and learned the price Tabitha paid for her loyalty to Darius and their enterprise. “Mother would just go along with whatever he would tell her to do, and I know she used to get fed up at times,” Dorothea told Bohn. “She would plan something along social lines, and then a project would come up, and she would need to do picture work. It seemed that nothing in her life existed except that photographic business.”

Dorothea later came to understand the role each of her parents played in their successful partnership. She told Bohn, “They merely pooled their abilities and resourcefulness and together created something of great historical value.”

WHEN BOHN AND PETSCHEK decided to sell, they agreed the archive should return to Washington state. They also preferred a relatively small organization, one that would be open to sharing the collection with the public. Bohn met George Thomas, then the Whatcom Museum’s director, in 1978 at an exhibit in Sedro-Woolley. He asked Thomas whether the museum would be interested in the collection when the time came to pass it on. “He said an expletive of some sort,” Bohn says, “and then said yes.” The museum paid $60,000 for the collection.

One of the stipulations was the museum needed to make copies from the nitrate negatives, which are highly flammable and release hazardous gases as they deteriorate. Thomas hired Rod Slemmons, at the time a student at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, to make copies from the negatives. The Whatcom Museum is housed in Bellingham’s old city hall, and Slemmons set up shop in a dank and dark former jail cell in the building’s basement.

The Whatcom Museum’s archive includes about 4,000 images. A few hundred original glass negatives of various sizes are inserted in padded sleeves and stored in filing cabinets. Another 150 original nitrate negatives are stored in four refrigerators in the museum. Everything is copied on plastic safety film. The Kinsey collection brings in about 5,000annually,muchmoreinagoodyear.Consideringthemuseumhasownedthearchivefor45years,that’sagoodreturnonits5,000 annually, much more in a good year. Considering the museum has owned the archive for 45 years, that’s a good return on its 5,000annually,muchmoreinagoodyear.Consideringthemuseumhasownedthearchivefor45years,that’sagoodreturnonits60,000 investment.

Over the years, Kinsey photos have appeared on calendars, catalogs, postcards, CDs, magazines and books, including the front covers of Annie Dillard’s “The Living” and Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland.” Ken Burns used them in his documentaries “The West” and “Prohibition” and on the accompanying DVD box sets. They also were in the companion book to “The West.”

The museum receives an average of five to 10 requests for Kinsey images each month, though the demand is not what it once was. “I think that products that Kinsey images appeal to are going away,” Jewell says. Calendars and postcards are examples. People now are more likely to check the date or look at scenic photos on their computer or phone. Many of today’s buyers are individuals who want them for the walls of their home or business.

The city of Bellingham owns the archive and insures it. The value is based on the cost to replace a physical negative, which doesn’t include the content, which is priceless. The Kinsey archive is living history. The best kind of history.

John M. Harris; is an associate professor of journalism at Western Washington University in Bellingham.