The adventures and various works of a photographer, road tripper, former patron of the local arts, aspiring app developer, and late night coffee drinker and conversationalist.
Dallas is home to a healthy community of photographers and photography studios in the digital era. While the widespread prevalence of easy, convenient cameras in everyone's mobile device makes everyday photography easier than ever, there is still a niche carved out for professional work when it comes to memorializing important events or, just as importantly, people. This was no less the case in the earlier days of photography, in the days before Kodak and the Brownie camera made picture taking easily accessible to the masses. The portrait studios that operated in the late nineteenth century captured images on plates of glass and produced printed vanity photos, or "cabinet cards," by the dozen for those seeking to memorialize their own likenesses, or those of their family members or families. But while these studios helped create a valuable record of many early communities, their own legacies have so often been erased by over a century of urban development, with little to no evidence left to recall their one-time locations near city centers. In this post, we're going to go on a sort of "walking tour" of several such locations in the city of Dallas, and take a look at the stories behind seven early Dallas photography studios.
The tour area
My collection of albums, EPs, singles, and promotional discs from local and Texas-based artists numbers over 500 items as of this writing. While the majority of these run the gamut from average to ho-hum to downright awful, there are some gems sprinkled throughout that are worth having and worth listening to in 2024. Here are twenty-four of my favorites, albums I don't have just because I happened to pick them up in a secondhand store or acquire them at a show, but because they are genuinely good with a collection of good to great material.
