84

Frederick Monsen

1865-1929

Young Hopi Woman. 1905; printed before 1919.

Silver print
With Monsen's signature, dated inscription, and negative date in ink on print recto.
The image 16 1/8 x 11 7/8 in. (41 x 30.2 cm.), double mounted, the larger 21 x 15 1/2 in. (53.3 x 39.4 cm.)

  • Provenance:
    Cyr Auction Company, July 2006; to the Andrew Smith Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
  • Notes:
    Frederick Monsen moved to Salt Lake City with his family in 1868. His father was a photographer and he trained as a painter and by his teens Monsen was in business with his father. He took on assignments throughout the west, including for newspapers or other photographs such as William Henry Jackson. Monsen avidly if unofficially joined expeditions as a photographer, including the U.S. Geological (Mexican American Boundary) Survey. He photographed with Generals Crook and Miles at the end of the campaign against the Apaches in 1886, the Brown Stanton Survey (1889-1890), the Salton Sea Expedition (1891), Death Valley and other California Deserts (1893), Southwestern Indians (1894-1911), and the Yosemite National Park Boundary Survey (1896). A colleague of Adam Clark Vroman and Arnold Genthe, Monsen favored a handheld Kodak camera, which allowed him to photograph his subjects in candid rather than posed pictures.

    In 1906, his studio and negatives were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. To reconstruct his images after the loss he made copy negatives and borrowed negatives from Vroman and others. His gelatin silver print enlargements are among the most magnificent ever made of the Southwest Indian tribes. The largest collection of about 400 prints is at the Huntington Library in San Marino (Pasadena), California. Monsen described himself as an explorer, geographer, ethnographer, lecturer and artist, and was a frequent lecturer at the Explorer's club in New York, where he often resided for long periods of time.
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