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Native American Material
Between 1895 and 1910, the Museum collected most of its Native American ethnological and archaeological material to augment the collections obtained from the World's Columbian Exposition. Between 1897 and 1898, free-lance photographer Edward Allen and Museum curator George Dorsey documented the daily activities, ceremonies and peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, and the plains, plateau and desert regions of the western United States.
In 1899, Charles H. Carpenter was hired as the Museum's first full-time, professional photographer. He remained in that position until his retirement in 1947. Carpenter went with curators on several early expeditions including the 1900 Stanley McCormick-sponsored expedition which produced over 1,200 negatives of the Hopi Indian tribes. Carpenter and H.R. Voth, a missionary to the Hopi from 1893 to 1902, and ethnologist for the Field Columbian Museum, photographed daily activities and life of the villagers. Voth lived with the Hopi for several years. Photographer Sumner Matteson, under the direction of Dorsey, added other photographs of the Hopi to the Collection. Soon after these photography excursions, the United States Government severely restricted the use of cameras on Hopi reservations, and eventually banned them entirely.
John W. Hudson spent his life as a collector-scholar, and he amassed a significant number of California Indian baskets held by The Field Museum. The Smithsonian Institution, Brooklyn Museum and Hudson Museum in Ukiah, California also have material collected by Hudson. Photographs in The Field Museum's possession document the native Pomo, Yurok, Miwok and Hupa from 1900 to 1905 when Hudson was collecting artifacts under Dorsey's auspices. Hudson visited more than twenty tribes and photographed traditional activities such as basket-making, acorn-grinding and other aspects of daily life. In many cases, these photographs are the only visual record of such activities. The Hudson collection contains over 450 negatives. J. W. Hudson's field notes and papers were deposited at the Sun House (also called the Hudson Museum). Other strengths in the Collection of Native American culture include Dorsey and Carpenter's photographs of Cheyenne life, Matteson's prints of the Blackfoot tribe, and S. C. Simms' Crow and Cheyenne photographs.
Carpenter and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition
In 1904, the city of St. Louis was host to an exposition held to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. There were over forty-seven acres of exhibits of Philippine and Native American tribes including Pawnee, Pueblo, Pima, Pomo, Kwakiutl, Eskimo, Oglala and Rosebud Sioux who recreated ceremonies and lived in native habitats on the Fairgrounds. The Fair was Carpenter's last field assignment for the Museum, and he made over 3,000 negatives, including portraits of Geronimo and Pacific Northwest Coast Natives Americans Bob Harris and Charles Nowell. Prints from Charles Carpenter's series of Native American portraits taken at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition were requested by the Oglala Lakota College archives. Field Museum sent more than 100 photographs, but lacked detailed caption information for all but a few. In return, the College provided the Museum with the names and family histories of sixty of the photographs' subjects.
A. B. Lewis and Melanesia
From 1909 to 1913, Museum curator A. B. Lewis became the first American to conduct systematic ethnological field research in Melanesia. During the course of his travels, Lewis collected more than 12,000 examples of Melanesian ethnological material. This is the largest American collection of such material, and it is one of the world's largest collections from that area of the Pacific. Lewis created an extensive photographic record of the areas he visited. His photographs, numbering more than 2,000, represent over one hundred different societies in Melanesia and have been used to catalogue and interpret his collections of artifacts. Many of Lewis' photographs have been displayed in Field Museum exhibits.
West African grassfields - Cameroon
Field Museum contains one of the finest collections of Cameroon artifacts from the West African grassfields. In the 1920's, Jan Kleykamp, representing the J .F. G. Umlauff Company in Hamburg, sold a collection of artifacts to The Field Museum. The purchase included 332 ethnological photographs taken in 1912 and have been attributed to a man named Schroeder (Geary 1988: 141). Like the A. B. Lewis photographs, Schroeder's images consist of village scenes and portraits that illustrate the use and social context of the artifacts. There is a growing interest by ethnographers for source materials on African history. The often complete destruction of photographic material held by German museums during two world wars makes Field Museum's Schroeder photographs of particular value to scholars of African art and culture.
Worcester Collection
During the 1920's, Museum curator Fay-Cooper Cole visited the Philippine Islands and Indonesia. Through a prominent Philippine official, Dean C. Worcester, Cole obtained over 200 prints of the area taken by Worcester's personal photographer. The Worcester Collection is an extremely important and untapped resource for the study of Philippine anthropology (in particular, the Nias region), and late colonial Philippine history. Cole also took more than 400 photographs while visiting other areas of Indonesia and the Philippines.
Laufer Collection
Berthold Laufer, Curator of Asian Ethnology, spent three years in China and Tibet in the 1920's while laying the foundation for the Museum's highly regarded collection of Asian material. The collection of negatives that Laufer made while in the Far East include photographs of important ceremonies, daily life and portraits.
The Father of Modern Taxidermy - Carl Akeley
In the late 1800's, Carl E. Akeley collected and mounted animals for Field Museum, and revolutionized the art of taxidermy. None are more famous than the "Fighting African Elephants" on display in the Museum's Stanley Field Hall. Akeley made two separate trips to Africa in 1895 and 1906. Akeley was also a photographer, and made thousands of negatives of the trips including villages and native peoples. Some of these photographs were used by Akeley in mounting the mammals he collected. Akeley's negatives show the capture of the Elephants, which were first displayed at Field Columbian Museum in 1908.
Rawson-Macmillan Subarctic Expedition
From 1926 to 1928, the Museum sponsored the interdisciplinary Rawson-Macmillan Subarctic Expedition. Assistant Curator of North American Ethnology and Archaeology, William Duncan Strong, led the anthropological expedition. Strong excavated archaeological sites during the summer months and studied the Naskapi Indians during the winter months. Joseph Field, son of then Museum president Stanley Field, was a member of the expedition and took several hundred photographs of the Naskapi and Labrador. Over 1,700 negatives were produced during the three year expedition.
Henry Field
Physical anthropologist Henry Field spent the period between 1928 and 1934 excavating and collecting material from the Sumerian-Akkadian capital of Kish and nearly 5,000 photographs of the excavations, and ethnological portraits of villagers were produced by Field or his associates. Field also took photographs of prehistoric caves in France and Spain, and gathered data from which sculptor Frederick Blaschke created a series of nine life-sized "Prehistoric Man" dioramas for display at Field Museum.
Other Museum Expeditions
During the early 1900's, the Department of Anthropology collected artifacts mainly on the North American continent, while the departments of Zoology, Geology, and Botany concentrated on collecting in Central and South America. Natural science materials were collected, but like Akeley's African photographs, there are also many of village scenes and portraits. Geological expeditions during this period focused on the western states of Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.
Malvina Hoffman-Sculptor
In 1930, Stanley Field, the nephew of Museum Founder Marshall Field I, commissioned artist Malvina Hoffman to sculpt and cast bronze figures depicting the peoples of the world. "The Races of Mankind" is the largest singly-commissioned body of her work and consists of 104 busts, heads, and life-sized figures. In preparation for the exhibit, Hoffman and her husband, S. B. Grimson, traveled throughout the world to find authentic models for the sculptures. The resulting photographs from the trip appear in her two autobiographies, as well as in several publications about Hoffman. The original negatives (over 2,000) represent one of the most complete photographic records of her travels.
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