October 1, 2009
Capturing the fair on film: Bromberg’s book studies AYPE photography of Frank Nowell
If you’ve been on campus this year, you’ve probably seen photos made by Frank Nowell. There have been a lot of them around, because this is the centennial year of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, and Nowell was that event’s official photographer.
But who was Frank Nowell? That’s what Nicolette Bromberg wanted to know. As visual materials curator for the UW Libraries, she had been familiar with Nowell’s work for a long time, and a couple of years ago, with the centennial celebration coming up, she began organizing the Nowell AYPE photos held by the libraries and creating a finding aid so that interested people could easily locate the photographs they wanted. Then she got to thinking — why not do a book about Nowell, including a generous selection of his photos?
“But when I started looking for information about him, I found only one small article in the Alaska Review and several obituaries,” Bromberg said. “So then I started digging.”
The result of her efforts is Picturing the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: The Photographs of Frank H. Nowell, a new book from the University of Washington Press. It includes a short biography of Nowell coupled with a number of his photos — some from the AYPE and others from Alaska. And it also includes the then-and-now AYPE campus scenes made by John Stamets’ architecture students. (See our story about that project here.)
Nowell, it turns out, was not an obvious choice to be the exposition’s photographer. He had only come to Seattle a short time before and his photography studio was in Nome, Alaska. And besides, there were many talented photographers in Seattle at the time, including at least one name — Asahel Curtis — that we would recognize today.
But Nowell, Bromberg said, had connections. He was a member of both the Alaska Club and the Arctic Brotherhood — local organizations for people who had lived in and/or were boosters of Alaska — and he had business savvy acquired through working with his father.
Nowell grew up in Boston, one of the seven sons of Thomas Nowell, an entrepreneurial sort of man who had business interests stretching across the country, including in Alaska. It was after his father started a mining business in Alaska that Frank Nowell went there, where he worked in his father’s company and on business ventures of his own. But sometime in the early 1890s he took up photography as a hobby.
Bromberg learned this fact in a serendipitous way. “There was a woman who apparently saw our Nowell photos and contacted me out of the blue — she’s from the East — and she said, ‘I have a collection of Nowell photos. Do you want them?’ I said I did. She sent them to me and they were very mysterious because they were from Montana. I had no indication [Nowell] had ever been in Montana. The photos were really great because they were signed, ‘Frank Hamilton Nowell, amateur photographer.’ Eventually I found out that Nowell married a woman whose brother lived in Helena, Montana, and they went there in 1894 to be married. So those are the earliest photos I know of that exist from Frank Nowell, and I was very excited to get them.”
Nowell and his new wife lived for a time in California, but Nowell was soon back in Alaska — first working for his father and then for another company, selling supplies to miners prospecting for gold. Later, he set up his own supply business, but all the time he was taking photographs, and in 1903 he decided to open up his own studio in Nome. He considered the area too rough for his wife and daughter, however, and by 1904 they were living in Seattle. Nowell divided his time between Seattle and Nome.
Seattle city fathers, meanwhile, were cooking up a fair. Inspired by Portland’s 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, where the Alaska exhibit had been very popular, they planned at first an Alaskan exposition, with the enthusiastic support of the Alaska Club and the Arctic Brotherhood. Because the first gold strikes were in the Klondike area of Canada, the Yukon was added. Then the project was expanded to a world’s fair, representing all the lands along the Pacific, and its title became the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition.
Nowell had, by this time, taken many photos in Alaska, and in 1907 he and some other photographers published a series of small books, Art Work of Seattle and Alaska, that surely was one of the factors in his being chosen as the AYPE’s official photographer. Beginning with the June 1, 1907, groundbreaking, he documented everything.
“He was an excellent photographer,” Bromberg said. “Compositionally he was very good; technically he was very good. He had really nice imagery. He had a wonderful eye.”
She had the difficult task of choosing about 60 photos for the book out of nearly 1,000 in the library’s collection. About 900 of those are from the AYPE, another group is from Alaska, and then there are about 30 Montana photos.
“Some of them are obvious choices, like the one of the crowd on the Pay Streak,” Bromberg said. “But I know the photos that people use over and over again, and what I wanted to do was highlight some of the photos you don’t see often. For example, one of the last photos in the book is a view of the agricultural building with one of their decorative urns in the foreground. There are lots of photos of the agricultural building, but this was a different view.”
After the fair, Nowell opened a photography studio in Seattle and operated it for 25 years before retiring to his ranch nearby. He lived there until his death in 1950. His obituary, Bromberg said, mentioned nothing about his activities at the AYPE, which by then had been nearly forgotten.
Bromberg said she had enjoyed her sojourn with Nowell. “He was a really interesting guy,” she said. “From everything I was able to learn, he would have been a great guy to know because he was very genial. And I hope people get the same enjoyment out of the photos that I did. They capture the little moments of the fair and help you get some of the feel of what it was like here. The exposition was something amazing that happened. We can see it through the photos.”
Picturing the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition is available through UW Press. See the catalog here.
An exhibit in 102 Suzzallo, When the World Came to Campus, spotlights the AYPE and features a number of Nowell’s photos. It continues through Oct. 30.
