1935-1939.
Price: $2,500.00
Hardcover. Oblong folio. 14" x 10.5" String-tied decorated paper over boards. A little light rubbing on the boards, near fine. Internally fine. Contains 223 gelatin silver images each measuring approximately 3 x 4.5", plus four commercial images, approximately a half dozen images are lacking. Excellent captions with a few extensive or full pages of handwritten commentary, all in white album ink. Documentation of annual vacations with details of locations, dates and places. The captions indicate that the middle-age couple whose chronicle this is lived in San Francisco, but also owned a ranch in Utah, and shows images of them there. It begins with them staying at ranch of Harold and Essie Greene in Williams, Arizona in 1935, follows them to the Grand Canyon, and then pictures them on their Monticello, Utah ranch, and identifies guests and neighbors, and then later that summer at the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado. and then later to Hoover Dam, near Las Vegas.
Before the photographs from 1936 is a detailed chronology of their vacation: trip to San Francisco before setting out for a camping trip to Richardson's Grove along the Eel River to see the giant redwoods.
Before the 1937 trip is a brief explanation: "Due to surgery in April and poor recovery, I could not take a long trip... we drove to Laguna Beach where we stayed at the Laguna Beach Hotel..." Following are, predictably, many beach photos.
In 1938 they chronicle another vacation, stayed at Manz Camp on the Snake River near Yellowstone Park, where they spent several days, then drove on to Ogden, Salt Lake City, and on to their ranch in Monticello where they had 65 acres of wheat under cultivation. This is followed by some attractive and nicely composed but slightly predictable but particularly well-captioned pictures of Yellowstone, images of geysers, water fall, bears, and the Teton Basin, as well of their Utah ranch, with several of neighbors and friends, mostly identified, and some on horseback on the ranch.
Finally in 1939, they begin their vacation visiting previously mentioned friends in Arizona, only to discover that their friends mother had died the night before. This leads them on a peripatetic journey through Arizona and New Mexico, and then on to their Utah ranch where they record some of the harvesting, and from whence they took day trips - including: "...met Marie Ogden, owner and editor of San Juan Record, and leader of a religious cult, known as 'The House of Truth' ". They then go to Gallup, New Mexico for several days and witness tribal meetings of over 30 tribes, much of which they documented in a couple of dozen photos.
The album contains a generous amount of clear and well-composed images. Despite the somewhat prosaic nature of vacation photographs, this is a pleasing and engaging collection of images. While we have not identified the compilers (predictably and frustratingly while they carefully identify everyone else, they refer to themselves only by first names), we suspect a modest amount of research would probably yield their identities.
Item #411535
