(Lander, WY) – Randy Wise stood inside the Lander Pioneer Museum on Friday evening and did what he does best: told stories about Wyoming’s past, this time through the lens of the photographers who documented it.
Wise, the museum’s curator and a historian with deep knowledge of the state’s visual record, gave the talk to open the Wyoming Through the Lens photo contest exhibit, a traveling show sponsored by Wyoming Public Media that is making stops around the state.
He started with William Henry Jackson, who Wise called the first photographer in Wyoming. Jackson used glass plate photography to make images starting in the 1870s that still hold up today and tell valuable stories. Among his most well-known is a photograph of Chief Washakie with a group of Eastern Shoshone. He also made photographs of South Pass at the height of the gold boom, documenting hundreds of buildings spread across the valley at a time when somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000 miners lived there.
“A picture’s worth a thousand words,” Wise said. “You could describe it to someone, but seeing it is a whole different thing. It was true of photography then, and it still is today.”
Wise traced a line from Jackson through the photographers who followed. Joseph Stimson was amongst the next photographers to work in Wyoming. Stephen Nelson Leek came to the Jackson area not as a photographer but as a hunter and guide. He became an important photographer after George Eastman, of Eastman Kodak, who was one of Leek’s hunting clients, gave him a camera.
Closer to home, Wise talked about the photographers who worked in and around Lander. Wynn Scott ran the Rembrandt Studio on Main Street, where he made portraits on film. George Scott, no relation, worked for the U.S. Weather Service out of the old stage station on Main Street. Charles Sprol worked in both Lander and Riverton.
Wise also talked about the Brownie camera, the first mass-produced camera, made by Eastman and sold for a dollar at the turn of the century. The Brownie put photography in the hands of everyday people, and Wise spoke about the hobbyist photographers in the Lander area who took their cameras all over Wyoming. He also stressed the value of captioning photographs so that future generations know the stories behind them.
The Pioneer Museum holds many of these photographers’ works in its collection, which can be viewed by appointment.
By the end of the talk, community members were raising their hands, asking Wise about old family photographs. He answered their technical and historical questions one by one, with the kind of knowledge that comes from years spent studying the history of photo making, especially in a local sense.
The Wyoming Through the Lens exhibit is now on display at the Pioneer Museum for the month of April.