Kinsey Photographer

Kinsey Photographer: The Locomotive Portraits

Andy Fraser, from London, has excellent taste in books. I wasn't going to post these Kinsey books until the next round of links. I had finished posting what I had planned on posting and was organizing the books that I was going to recommend next. (I'm reading the books faster than I can post them.) Then the mailman came and there was a package from amazon.com to me. That was a surprise. Andy, a regular reader of this blog, bought Kinsey Photographer for me, from my Amazon Wishlist. Thank you thank you thank you!

I bought the Locomotive Portraits book several months ago at Costco. Then, when I saw a mention of Darius at APUG I posted some Darius links. The first link in that post has a number of his photographs. A website customer of mine, David Iles, saw that post and lent me Kinsey Photographer which he had checked out of the Library. I promptly checked it out, read it, and added it to my Amazon wishlist. I had to have it.

Darius' photographs leave me speechless. He photographed in the woods around Puget Sound taking pictures of the loggers and selling them prints. He did this for 50 years. He fell of a stump in 1940 at the age of 70 and never photographed again. The pictures he left are amazing. (Whatcom County Museum has 4,700 negatives and 600 prints of Darius Kinsey.) Most were taken with his 11x14 camera. He started out with glass plates and moved to film around 1913. This was in the age of contact prints. If you wanted a bigger photograph, you used a bigger camera. This was also before the age of light meters. He exposed from experience. His wife Tabitha did all the darkroom work developing the negatives by inspection and making the contact prints. While the logger pictures were the paying pictures he took landscape pictures whenever he could. Not only are the photographs excellent, they also document a way of life that has past. He documented the logging of Washington State's old growth timber. His loggers used axes and hand saws. Both books are beautifully done with lots of supporting text.

Kinsey is at the top of my list of admired photographers. I would have to say he shares top billing with Atget. Darius and Tabitha are buried in the Nooksack Cemetery. I hope to make it up there some day. I'll take a picture with a big camera.

From Amazon on Kinsey Photographer:

A magnificent collection of 206 classic duotone photographs of the Pacific Northwest taken in the first half of the century by renowned photographers Darius and Tabitha Kinsey. A stunning book of photography and a testament to the beauty of the region and the colorful life of its people. Captures the romance and rugged splendor of the Northwest--the glaciers, streams, trees, and loggers. Printed on high-quality matte art paper.

From Amazon on Kinsey Photographer: The Locomotive Portraits:

In the winter of 1970, Dave Bohn found the surviving negatives of Darius and Tabitha Kinsey. Bohn and his colleague, Rodolfo Petschek, initiated a long-term effort to reproduce in book form the magnificent Kinsey archive. Here you’ll find Darius and Tabitha Kinsey’s lifework on display in this volume featuring 53 superb photographs of the logging industry’s steam locomotives, historical essays by John Labbe on each locomotive and the logging operations it served, and excerpts from conversations with some of the oldtime engineers, firemen, and brakemen.