An Adirondack Original
In
the early 1900s, Henry M. Beach earned a living roaming
New York’s Adirondack region as a postcard photographer.
He snapped pictures at train stations, hunting and lumber
camps, paper mills, mines, hotels, and schools, made them
into postcards, and sold them. “He just fired away,”
says Robert C. Bogdan G’64, G’71, who holds a
dual appointment with the Maxwell School and the School
of Education as a professor of sociology and cultural foundations
of education. “He did a lot of quirky things, but he
also produced absolutely striking pictures.”
Bogdan
explores Beach’s life and work in a new book, Adirondack
Vernacular: The Photography of H.M. Beach (Syracuse
University Press, 2003). It’s a follow-up to Bogdan’s
Exposing the Wilderness: Early 20th Century Adirondack
Postcard Photographers (SU Press, 1999), which featured
Beach and five contemporaries. “This guy is really
authentic,” Bogdan says. “He is truly a person
who’s from the region and of the region. Many photographers
try to emulate a vernacular style, but Beach is vernacular.”
Bogdan
first crossed Beach’s trail when he found some photographic
postcards of the Lowville, New York, area, where Beach had
lived most his life. Curious about who took the pictures,
Bogdan met with Lowville town historian George Davis G’48,
who collected postcards and was knowledgeable about Adirondack
photographers. Davis took Bogdan to Beach’s grave and
around the area, introducing him to local folks familiar
with the photographer. After that, Bogdan hunted high and
low for information on Beach and his postcards. He traveled
throughout the Adirondacks, attended postcard shows, scoured
eBay, contacted numerous postcard collectors and dealers,
and combed phone directories for Beach’s relatives.
He even met Beach’s granddaughter, who shared the family
album with him.
Bogdan
estimates he looked at 15,000 of Beach’s pictures and
chose more than 250 for Adirondack Vernacular. As
a sociologist, he says photos must be examined in context
to truly learn about a particular region and era. “In
some ways the pictures represent what’s meaningful
to the people there, how they framed their world, and what
they wanted to show,” Bogdan says. “You get a
real glimpse of what life was like and what changes were
taking place in this region and, for that matter, across
the country.” One Beach postcard, for instance, highlights
a tourist cabin sink with running water, a luxury at that
time. Another features a general store with both a horse-drawn
buggy and an automobile parked outside. “The growth
of the postcard industry was very much connected to the
mass production of the auto,” Bogdan says. “As
the roads were developed, the Adirondacks became more accessible,
and more people traveled and started buying postcards.”
Beach,
who died in the early ’40s at age 79, was by all accounts
quite a character. An elderly woman, who had lived next
door to the Beach family as a child, told Bogdan how Beach
liked to feed pancakes to her family’s dog. Beach also
blew pipe smoke into the dog’s ear to relieve its itching
from ticks. Bogdan laughs when he recalls a postcard of
Beach holding a fish. In another version of the card, the
fish is much larger—thanks to Beach, who had cut out
the original and replaced it. “I really appreciate
him as a person, a craftsperson, and a creative person,”
Bogdan says. “He has provided a vehicle for me to understand
the social and cultural history of the area.”
—Jay
Cox
