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.
I purchased this vintage photo from an online auction. The expression on this young lady's face is a bit inscrutable. Is she sassily hamming it up for the camera? Or is she about to eat the photographer? Her scary disposition makes this vintage photo a fun pick for this year's Halloween.
Blind Lemon circa 1926
During a recent trip to Houston, I made a detour off the interstate and headed toward the town of Wortham, Texas. This detour wasn't taken to skirt the endless traffic bottlenecks or the constantly recurring speed traps along I-45 between Ennis and Houston; it was to pay my respects to a true icon of Texas music. Hailing from Coutchman, Texas (now a ghost town) as the child of sharecroppers, Lemon Henry "Blind Lemon" Jefferson, along with Lead Belly and T-Bone Walker, was one of the pioneering forces in the development of the original Deep Ellum music scene during the 1920s and '30s. Beginning as a street musician in East Texas towns and later ending up in Dallas by (probably) 1917, Jefferson would go on to graduate from street busker to eventual successful recording artist courtesy of a contract with Paramount Records. Along with the aforementioned Lead Belly, Walker, and others, he became one of the progenitors of a long tradition of highly influential Texas musicians who put us on the map beginning in the late 1910s and continuing through to modern times.
