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    Mobile:: Photographs from the William E. Wilson Collection
    Mobile:: Photographs from the William E. Wilson Collection
    Mobile:: Photographs from the William E. Wilson Collection
    Ebook180 pages38 minutes

    Mobile:: Photographs from the William E. Wilson Collection

    By Marilyn Culpepper

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    About this ebook

    Beautiful Mobile, Alabama, on the Gulf of Mexico, has a colorful history dating back to its founding in 1702. Few photographers have captured the essence of Mobile-its people, places, and events-to the extent of master photographer William Ernest Wilson. Wilson's photography vividly depicts Mobile life at the turn of the twentieth century and is the subject of this engaging visual journey. From nationally elected officials such as Theodore Roosevelt to local Mardi Gras royalty, from entrepreneur Gordon Smith of Smith's Bakery to Africa Town founder Cudjoe Lewis, from a stately cathedral to country churches, from thriving banks and theaters to lumber yards and banana docks, the people and places of Mobile are revealed through Wilson's camera as a kaleidoscope of life in a bustling seaport. Artistic shading and Wilson's innate ability to see beyond the lens give his photographs an air of the contemporary while reflecting a bygone era of simplicity. These images simultaneously reveal the height of Victorian photographic art and daily life in one of the South's first major cities. Covering the period from 1894 to 1905, the collection features personalities, street scenes, and architectural treasures of the past. Preserved on their original dry glass negatives, a significant portion of Wilson's Mobile photographs are collected and printed here in a single edition for the first time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439627839
    Mobile:: Photographs from the William E. Wilson Collection
    Author

    Marilyn Culpepper

    Award-winning veteran journalist Marilyn Culpepper, now executive director of Historic Mobile Preservation Society, has opened the century-old Wilson files and drawn from the society's collection of more than two thousand of his remarkable photographs. In Mobile: Photographs from the William E. Wilson Collection, she has produced not a history book, but a family album from one man's celebration of his adopted city.

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      Book preview

      Mobile: - Marilyn Culpepper

      Society.

      INTRODUCTION

      William Ernest Wilson’s camera made time stand still in Mobile at the turn of the twentieth century.

      William E. Wilson was born in 1853 in London, England. His father, James Wilson, was an artist and photographer. James and his young family emigrated from England to the United States when William was two years old and they entered through the port of Charleston, South Carolina. The family settled in New York, but traveled back to South Carolina in 1861 where they lived until moving to Mobile in 1867.

      The 1870 federal census lists James Wilson as a resident of Mobile. His son William is listed there as a 17-year-old photographer, following in his father’s footsteps. A published advertisement in 1871 promotes J.T. Wilson’s Photographic Gallery as a place where copies could be made from old pictures such as Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and others. He also offered services in the restoration of oil paintings, making porcelain pictures from life or other pictures, life-size paintings in pastel, framing, and painting.

      As an adult, William moved to Georgia with his wife, an Englishwoman named Ellen Alice Brill. He and his family lived in Savannah where he worked as a master photographer. The family moved back to Mobile in 1894. They lived at 41 Springhill Shell Road and later on Chidester Avenue. He operated his photography business at three Mobile locations—first at 65 Dauphin Street, then 12 St. Emanuel Street, and finally at 12 South Conception Street.

      In Mobile, William Wilson was a familiar figure traveling about with his camera. He reportedly shared his expertise with amateur photographers in the community and passed his photography skills on to his son, William Tristram Wilson, known as Willie, who continued to run his father’s studio for a few years after William Wilson’s death in October 1905.

      Although much of his surviving collection is made up of unidentified portraits, Wilson’s work is what we today describe as documentary photography. This phrase was coined in the 1930s to describe the work of the Farm Security Administration. During the Great Depression such photography was used to show the American public the plight of the nation’s impoverished farmers. In this respect, Wilson was ahead of his time, portraying everyday people, places, and events with clear, direct simplicity that touches the heart and elicits a sense of familiarity with the subject.

      The Mobile in which Wilson plied his craft was an amalgam of change—a city in transition from a devastating war, years of post-war occupation, changing economic times, and a new era of government, commerce, and society. Wilson’s photographs show Mobile during one of its most interesting periods.

      Today, we marvel at the artistry of Wilson’s photographs. His street scenes and architectural photographs are as striking as his portraiture. In Wilson’s lens, each person evokes a dignified image, each structure seems timeless, and even the aftermath of a disaster is compelling.

      As writer and historian John Sledge observed, The marvelous images of William Wilson capture for all time the languor, grace, and quaint Victorian trappings of this now barely imaginable world. That he was here, and thought to record these scenes, is cause for celebration and delight.

      Wilson’s photographs are housed at the Historic Mobile Preservation Society’s Minnie Mitchell Archives in the Oakleigh Historic Complex in Mobile, Alabama. Some 2,000 dry-glass negatives make up the Mobile collection of Wilson’s photography from 1894 to 1905. Reproductions from the negatives have been popular among scholars, historians, and photography enthusiasts since Wilson’s son gave the collection to the society in the 1950s.

      Mrs. Carter Smith, archives chairman for the Historic Mobile Preservation Society in 1975, was responsible for much of the preservation of these negatives. Mrs. Smith, along with Mrs. Norman Shelton and Mrs. Richard Wells, devoted many hours to sorting, cataloging, indexing, and filing the negatives. The negatives were reproduced and stored after being assembled. The Mitchell Foundation, the archives’s

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