The Matson Photo Service

Last updated

The Matson Photo Service, whose founders were G. Eric Matson and his wife Edith, evolved from the American Colony Photo Department that helped fund the philanthropic work of The American Colony in Jerusalem; a Christian utopian society, established in 1881 by Horatio Spafford and his Norwegian born wife Anna, whose members shared a belief in the Second Coming of Christ. [1]

Contents

History

After a series of tragedies in which Horatio Spafford's law firm suffered severe physical and financial damage in the Great Fire of Chicago of 1871, and the Spaffords lost their 4 daughters at sea when the liner, on which Anna was travelling to Europe, collided with another vessel, they moved to Jerusalem with a group of Americans who shared their religious beliefs. There, they established a religious colony, whose purpose of its members was not to convert non-Christians, but to live and worship together whilst undertaking charitable work in the Palestinian community for all faiths. Towards the end of the century there was an influx of Americans and Swedes into the community and to finance their work they tapped into the burgeoning tourist industry in Jerusalem, not only opening a hostel and souvenir shop for travellers but also a photography department. [2]

Gastgifvar Eric Matson (June 16, 1888 – December 1977) was born in the Nås parish of Dalarna, Sweden. [3] In 1896, the Matson family together with a group of their Nås countrymen moved to Jerusalem and joined the American Colony. In 1898, Elijah Meyers, who had emigrated from India to Jerusalem in the 1890s and was a Jewish convert to Christianity, used his photographic knowledge gained in Bombay and London to found the American Colony Photo Department. [4] Meyers trained the next generation of photographers, Lewis Larsson, who headed the photo operation between 1903 and 1933, [4] Eric and Lars Lind, Furman Baldwin and G. Eric Matson, amongst others. [5] These photographers together with photographic assistants, lab technicians and hand-tinting artists were responsible for taking, developing, printing and hand tinting prints, and producing thematic photograph albums, stereographs, panoramic photos, postcards, and glass lantern slides. These were sold in the Colony's store near Jaffa Gate and also to newspapers, periodicals (between 1913 and 1940 a series of National Geographic articles on the Middle East were published that featured American Colony images by Matson and Larsson), and were included in travel books. [4]

Entrance to The Matson Photo Service, Australian Soldiers Club (old Fast Hotel), Jerusalem dated October 10, 1940 Fast matson photos.jpg
Entrance to The Matson Photo Service, Australian Soldiers Club (old Fast Hotel), Jerusalem dated October 10, 1940

G. Eric Matson started work in the darkroom of the American Colony Photo Department as an apprentice and there he met the Kansas born American Edith Yantiss (1889–1966), whose family was also part of the community. [2] They married in 1924 [3] and had three children, Anne, David and Margaret. [6] From 1934, when the Swedish and American sides of the Colony split, until 1940 when the department was renamed The Matson Photo Service, the Matsons managed the photography business with G. Eric Matson taking the photographs and his wife running the production side. [1] The Matsons, along with other employees, continued the business, that had relocated to the lower end of Jaffa Street, until the unrest in Palestine led them to move to the United States. They settled in Southern California and had the bulk of the photo service's negatives, which included the archive of the American Colony Photo Department, shipped to them. The Jerusalem side of the business carried on for a while but, after the store and offices suffered severe damage during the conflict of 1948–9 and the consequential decline of the tourist industry, it closed in the early 1950s. [2] The Matsons continued to sell photographs from California. [1]

Legacy

Edith Yantiss Matson died in 1966 and that year, her husband, realising the significance of the archive, donated some 13,000 negatives and eleven albums of contact prints to the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. In 1970, the Library shipped another group of negatives, which had been stored in the YMCA basement in Jerusalem and suffered water damage, to Washington D.C. In 1971, Matson assisted staff at the Library of Congress in the organisation and identification of the photographs. [1]

The collection, now called "The G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection", consists of some 23,000 negatives and prints from the archives of the American Colony Photo Department as well as the Matson Photo Service that were donated between 1966 and 1981 by Matson and/or his beneficiary, the Home for the Aged of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Los Angeles (now called the Kensington Episcopal Home). [7] [8] [9]

Photographs attributed to The Matson Photo Service, Jerusalem are also held in the Conway Library at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, whose archive, of primarily architectural images, is in the process of being digitised under the wider Courtauld Connects project. [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ansel Adams</span> American photographer and environmentalist (1902–1984)

Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mathew Brady</span> American photographer (c. 1823 – 1896)

Mathew B. Brady was an American photographer. Known as one of the earliest and most famous photographers in American history, he is best known for his scenes of the Civil War. He studied under inventor Samuel Morse, who pioneered the daguerreotype technique in America. Brady opened his own studio in New York City in 1844, and went on to photograph U.S. presidents John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Van Buren, among other public figures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photographers of the American Civil War</span>

The American Civil War was the most widely covered conflict of the 19th century. The images would provide posterity with a comprehensive visual record of the war and its leading figures, and make a powerful impression on the populace. Something not generally known by the public is the fact that roughly 70% of the war's documentary photography was captured by the twin lenses of a stereo camera. The American Civil War was the first war in history whose intimate reality would be brought home to the public, not only in newspaper depictions, album cards and cartes-de-visite, but in a popular new 3D format called a "stereograph," "stereocard" or "stereoview." Millions of these cards were produced and purchased by a public eager to experience the nature of warfare in a whole new way.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gordon Parks</span> American photographer, musician, writer and film director

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was an American photographer, composer, author, poet, and film director, who became prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism in the 1940s through 1970s—particularly in issues of civil rights, poverty and African Americans—and in glamour photography. He is best remembered for his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s, for his photographic essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the films Shaft, Shaft's Big Score and the semiautobiographical The Learning Tree.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Colony, Jerusalem</span> 19th-century American colony in Palestine

The American Colony of Jerusalem was established in the Ottoman Empire in 1881 as a "Christian utopian society" led by American religious leader Horatio Gates Spafford and his Norwegian wife Anne Tobine Larsen Øglende.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Henry Jackson</span> American photographer and painter (1843–1942)

William Henry Jackson was an American photographer, Civil War veteran, painter, and an explorer famous for his images of the American West. He was a great-great nephew of Samuel Wilson, the progenitor of America's national symbol Uncle Sam. He was the great-grandfather of cartoonist Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead comics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francis Frith</span> English photographer

Francis Frith was an English photographer and businessman. Francis Frith & Co., the company he founded in 1860 with the initial goal of photographing every town and village in England, quickly became the largest photographic publishers in the world and eventually amassed a collection of 330,000 negatives covering over 7,000 population centres across Great Britain and Ireland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Toni Frissell</span> American photographer (1907–1988)

Antoinette Frissell Bacon, known as Toni Frissell, was an American photographer, known for her fashion photography, World War II photographs, and portraits of famous Americans, Europeans, children, and women from all walks of life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Horatio Spafford</span> American poet and lawyer

Horatio Gates Spafford was an American lawyer and Presbyterian church elder. He is best known for penning the Christian hymn It Is Well With My Soul following the Great Chicago Fire and the death of his four daughters on a transatlantic voyage aboard the S.S. Ville du Havre.

George Everard Kidder Smith was an American architect, author, educator, photographer and prolific "builder" of books and curator of exhibitions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carol M. Highsmith</span> American photographer (born 1946)

Carol McKinney Highsmith is an American photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed in all the states of the United States as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. She photographs the entire American vista in all fifty U.S. states as a record of the early 21st century.

<i>Österlandet</i>

Österlandet (ISBN 978-0-9794059-0-7) is a photography book released in 2007. It chronicles 100 years of change in Egypt and Jerusalem by retracing the travels of Algot Sätterström, a Swedish inventor and painter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E. Chambré Hardman</span> British photographer

Edward Fitzmaurice Chambré Hardman was an Anglo-Irish photographer, later based for most of his career in Liverpool. He was a landscape photographer by vocation, although his business was largely dependent on portraiture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ze'ev Aleksandrowicz</span> Israeli photographer

Ze'ev (Wilhelm) Aleksandrowicz was an Israeli photographer. He is mostly known for his work in Palestine and Japan, during the first half of the 1930s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women photographers</span> Women working as photographers

The participation of women in photography goes back to the very origins of the process. Several of the earliest women photographers, most of whom were from Britain or France, were married to male pioneers or had close relationships with their families. It was above all in northern Europe that women first entered the business of photography, opening studios in Denmark, France, Germany, and Sweden from the 1840s, while it was in Britain that women from well-to-do families developed photography as an art in the late 1850s. Not until the 1890s, did the first studios run by women open in New York City.

Najib Anton Albina was the master photographer of the Palestine Archaeological Museum and, in that position, took the first original sets of photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Through his positions with the American Colony and Palestine Archaeological Museum, he used photography as a means of recording the history of Christian Palestinian culture as well as the discovery of past cultures in the region. He had a significant impact on the techniques of archeological photographers, especially those who took pictures of the Dead Sea Scrolls, through his contributions to the use of infrared photography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lewis Larsson</span>

Lewis Larsson, was born Hol Lars Larsson in Nås, Sweden, and served as the de facto head of the Photographic Department of the American Colony in Jerusalem, British Mandate Palestine. Larsson was renowned for his use of photojournalism to record and document the cultures of the south Mediterranean, primarily within the Palestinian region. Larsson was also a well respected diplomat of Sweden who acted as the vice consul and consul to Jerusalem and in that role acted in the best interests of the American Colony.

Anthony Frank Kersting was a British architectural photographer. His images of British, European, and Middle Eastern architecture also feature urban and village life, landscape, commerce, transport and leisure. He was considered to be the leading architectural photographer of his generation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zoltan Kluger</span> Israeli photographer

Zoltan (Zvi) Kluger was an Israeli photographer. He is known as one of the most important photographers in Mandatory Palestine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photography in Sudan</span> History of photography in Sudan

Photography in Sudan refers to both historical as well as to contemporary photographs taken in the cultural history of today's Republic of the Sudan. This includes the former territory of present-day South Sudan, as well as what was once Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and some of the oldest photographs from the 1860s, taken during the Turkish-Egyptian rule (Turkiyya). As in other countries, the growing importance of photography for mass media like newspapers, as well as for amateur photographers has led to a wider photographic documentation and use of photographs in Sudan during the 20th century and beyond. In the 21st century, photography in Sudan has undergone important changes, mainly due to digital photography and distribution through social media and the Internet.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection – The American Colony and the Matson Photo Service". www.loc.gov. 1898. Retrieved August 5, 2022.
  2. 1 2 3 "Matson Photo Service | Malikian Collection" . Retrieved August 5, 2022.
  3. 1 2 "G. Eric Matson, Photographer at Historic Camera". www.historiccamera.com. Retrieved August 5, 2022.
  4. 1 2 3 "The American Colony Photography Department: Western Consumption and "Insider" Commercial Photography". Institute for Palestine Studies. Retrieved August 6, 2022.
  5. Shams, Ahmed (2011). Eight Years Wandering In The High Mountains Of Sinai Peninsula: A Tale Of Two Maps. Lulu.com. pp. 11–12. ISBN   9781447812838.
  6. LOC, Matson Photo Service / (April 24, 2020). "The Matson in the garden of their Jerusalem home". ABC News. Retrieved August 5, 2022.
  7. "Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection – Background and Scope". www.loc.gov. 1898. Retrieved August 11, 2022.
  8. "Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection – About this Collection". www.loc.gov. 1898. Retrieved August 11, 2022.
  9. Service, Matson Photo (1898). "Matson photograph collection". www.loc.gov. Retrieved August 11, 2022.
  10. Digitisation, Courtauld (June 30, 2020). "Who made the Conway Library?". Digital Media. Retrieved August 6, 2022.