[Rarebooks] FS: PORTLAND OREGON PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM Ca. 1915-1920: Includes mugging before the camera with each teen posing for a watermelon-eating shot, Pendelton Roundup, Parades and Political Rallies.

[Ezra Tishman]

Ezra from Aardvark offers this curious photo album. Ostensibly, it appears to be the garden variety early 20th century family-at-play gathering of images.
But a deeper look reveals a wide curiosity about the world and its attitudes, players and behaviors:

This oblong, string-bound album (11’ x 7”) contains better than 300 individual mounted. photographs, most 3 1/2” x 2 1/2, but some 5 1/2” x 3 1/4”, and 6 1/2” x 4 1/4”.  The album shows photographs of the family connected to Cicero Hunt Lewis for many years a wholesale grocers (Allen & Lewis) in Portland, Oregon and later president of Lewis Invesment Company, and dates roughly from about 1915 to 1918. The Lewis House on Military Lane, was a prime example of Tudor Revival style residence and was designed by his son, prominent Portland architect David Chambers Lewis. These were the direct descendants of pioneers, famed sea captains and Portland foundres. From the captions (there are some in pencil upon the black mounting paper, but not many), there were children named “Hunt” and “Couch”. I believe Couch Flanders Lewis may have died at less than five years old, perhaps in the Spanish Flu epidemic.  The family seems also to have summered near Gearhart, Oregon and spent time at (owned?) a ranch in Eastern Oregon. There are photographs of foreign travel, at the Panama Pacific International Exposition (1915); workers on a railroad, a rather palatial home in Portland, ranch scenes with shots of ranch hands, a new litter of pigs nursing upon an exhausted sow, pet pit bull, military parade shots with lots of bystanders, great shots of steam locomotives, people posing in front of Multnomah Falls; military photos (parades and soldiers), camping outings, women by the sea in knee length bathing outfits, vehicles in eastern Oregon towns, women driving, dogs, people at work, the hunt, mountain climbing, toom-by-room interiors of houses, couples strolling in their finery, an older building housing a Chinese laundry, an outdoor gathering of an Astronomy club, the golf links, early scenes along the Columbia. a football game, three larger snapshots of about four dozen dignitaries (senate?) sitting behind a political (?) speaker at a podium, with a dual U.S. & Oregon flag and a big floral sign “ ’20 “, between, a dirigible aloft. Of perhaps greater interest: Besides the standard privileged family shots of big houses on Portland streets (exterior and interior),  holidays at the seashore, etc. 

Also, this album contains some relatively strange and quirky images: 1.The (so-labeled) “Nig**er Garage Rose Festival 1915 from Hotel Portland" and other parade shots throughout. 2 Four or five images of these rich family members mugging for the camera while eating watermelon, one quite possibly imitating a character not unlike Step ‘n Fetchit, shots of calf-roping and bucking broncos at 7 nice shots at what is probably the Pendleton roundup only in its fifth year, and a group photograph of “the help “ - black maid, Asian chef and another Asian man - possibly a groundsman. And two of shots of women dressed up like native Americans, one with a bow and arrow. 

 This photograph album with more than 300 photos, easily transcends more often seen collections of “Instant Ancestors”; besides the more commonly encountered gathering of family scenes, this photographer or photographers also had an eye curious about crowds, and the quirky and everyday working life of people. It also includes a makeshift panorama, a page of “strip photos”, and an early color (autochrome?) photograph -- a girl and her dressed-up dog.

																										$550
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/u7668ux9xxsghkv/AAAGjyzUMHkCrNQXYNJeJEBra?dl=0 <https://www.dropbox.com/sh/u7668ux9xxsghkv/AAAGjyzUMHkCrNQXYNJeJEBra?dl=0>


Ezra The Bookfinder
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& Ezra Tishman Book Appraisals, LLC
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