Not Tantamount To Rarity: Fifty Years of Collecting

Material for the study of the history of photography derives from the Albert Boni collection of books and photographs from the mid-19th century to the present. It includes examples of such processes as calotype, cyanotype, and daguerreotype and works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Eadweard Muybridge, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Carleton E. Watkins. Recent photographers include Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Will Connell, Burton Holmes, Barbara Morgan, Otto Rothschild, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston. California is represented also in the work of Adelbert Bartlett, Louis Fleckenstein, Charles F. Lummis, C. C. Pierce, Ernest Pratt, and Henry Hebard West.
For documentary sources, the Department has formed an extensive collection of photographs on Southern California from the 1880s to the early 1950s. The Department houses the photographic archive of the Los Angeles Times (1893 to the present, with the Times retaining the most recent five years) and the Los Angeles Daily News (1923 - 1954). There are also collections of late 19th and early 20th century Latin American and Near Eastern photographs

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, 1787 - 1851. Historique et description des procédés du daguerréotype et du diorama rédigés par Daguerre, ornés du portrait de l'auteur, et augmentés de notes et d'observations par MM. Lerebours et Susse Frères. Paris: Susse frères, Lerebours, 1839. TR 16.1 D136h 1839 / TR 365 D15h 1839
The impact of this pamphlet upon social and cultural history would be difficult to estimate. It announced Daguerre's brilliant discovery, a method for producing the Daguerreotype, a permanent image made by the action of light on a chemically sensitized silver plate. A cornerstone of any history of photography collection, the work is one of more that 1,500 technical books, historic photograph albums, and early images in the Boni collection on the history of photography. The Albert Boni collection was begun with a gift from the publisher of the Boni imprints.

Carleton E. Watkins, 1829 - 1916. Mission, San Gabriel, Los Angeles County, California, Established September 8, 1771. ca. 1882. Black and white photograph, scanned copy enlarged. Original 38 x 54 cm. Mounted 50 x 65 cm. No. 1212 Watkins's New Series, 26 Montgomery Street, San Francisco. Collection ***98 [use visible file]
Carleton Watkins, photographer of Yosemite and the Pacific coast, was never successful financially. In 1875 he had to declare bankruptcy and lost negatives in the process. The photographs of the missions were made after that date, as he sought new commissions and a new series of images which he could sell. They are products of his aesthetic maturity, the first known series of mission photographs.
Compare this image with the more romanticized one circulated as the cover of the nursery catalog in the Architecture & Landscape Architecture portion of the exhibit. The reality is evident in this photograph, but the romanticized myth held sway, such as descriptions by Helen Hunt Jackson: "Walled gardens with waving palms, sparkling fountains, rows of olive trees, broad vineyards, and orchards of all manner of fruits; over all, the sunny, delicious, winterless sky."

Western Publishing & Novelty Co. Mission San Gabriel Archangel, California [color postcard]. Los Angeles, 1940s? Number at head of title: P.63; code: 6A - H2622. In: Collection of California postcards, 1890 - . Collection 1351. Box 13
This view is approximately that of Watkins's photograph. But the landscaping has changed from the leafy (but not full) trees in his photograph to palms and tropical blooms more in keeping with the image of a lush semi-tropical California. There probably were palms and flowers planted by the time of this card, but many postcard artists made the blooms more prominent than in the photographs on which the cards were based.

Barbara Brooks Morgan, 1900 - . Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce [1941]. TR16.8 .M821m
Barbara Morgan studied painting at UCLA (when it was the Southern Branch) and was a member of the art faculty, 1925 - 1930. In 1925 she married Willard D. Morgan, photographer and free-lance writer (later author of the widely imitated Leica Manual). He told her "photography is the real twentieth-century art," but she considered photography merely record, until helping Edward Weston hang a show of his work at UCLA: "That shock changed my life, for I then realized that external 'reality' can be transformed into an esthetic entity, through subjective vision coupled with technical controls. To Weston I owe the awakening, to Willard the original challenge and the continuing encouragement." In later years she lived in the east. She met Martha Graham and found the dancer's "search for a kind of communal ritual ... made her work spiritually akin to Indian [Native American] dance." In 1935 she began her photographs of Martha Graham -- a critic has termed Mrs. Morgan "quite simply the finest photographer of the dance."
Morgan gave the Dept. archival prints of some of her famous images, including some published in this work.
Barbara Morgan was interviewed by the UCLA Oral History Program (unfinished, request from University Archives through Special Collections.)

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