Boston Camera Club

Amateur photography in the United States got its first major boost in 1880, when the future Eastman Kodak Co. and others introduced dry plates-glass plates with pre-applied chemical emulsion.

Still, professionals and advanced amateurs typically continued to use glass plates until the early 20th century, when film was universally accepted.

Babcock was a professor of chemistry; French and Thurston Boston photographic suppliers; Hovey a newspaper editor.

It may have been selected by being the business address of both club founder Thurston, a photo supplier; and early vice president Charles Henry Currier, a jeweler and commercial photographer,[5] and by being in Boston's photo-supply district.

[7] For reasons begging research, by 1908 the Boston Camera Club was facing difficulties, journal Photo-Era saying it had been "long been on the sick list.

The club, it is believed in 1924, left 50 Bromfield Street and for some years met at the Boston Young Men's Christian Union (YMCU).

Although membership in 1934 was only 45, in 1936 with Latimer's bequest it purchased a building at nearby 351 Newbury Street, Back Bay,[12] where it occupied three floors, having two exhibition galleries, darkroom, library, and kitchen.

Because the Boston Camera Club was founded before amateur photography was widespread, many early members were knowledgeable practitioners.

Wilfred A. French was publisher and editor of journal Photo-Era, and a founding member of a group called the National Historic Picture Guild.

[26] Fred Holland Day, publisher, esthete, photo­graphy lecturer and mentor, and a leading U.S. artistic photographer of the late 19th and early 20th century, joined the Boston Camera Club in 1889.

[27] In 1896 a print by amateur Boston photographer Horace A. Latimer, the club's best-remembered early member, was shown at the Smithsonian Institution.

Another personality, Adolf "Papa" Fassbender, the German-born New York City educator called a "one-man photographic institution," had a career of 72 years training thousands in photography.

They include Gloucester (Massachusetts) Fisherman's Memorial sculptor Leonard Craske (KRASK); prolific Cape Ann, Massachusetts etcher, photographer, and author Samuel V. Chamberlain, who wrote at least 45 photo-illustrated travel books;[30] painter Emil Albert Grupp‚; and post-Secessionist photographer and watercolorist Eleanor Parke Custis.

Lesser known are his night aerial strobe work for the Allied D-Day invasion in World War II, his co-founding of defense contractor EG&G, and undersea explorations with Jacques Cousteau.

H. Bradford Washburn, Jr. was a noted mountaineer, cartographer, aerial photographer, and longtime first director of the Boston Museum of Science.

Lou Jones is a Boston-based commercial, Olympic Games, and jazz photographer, a photojournalist whose books include Final Exposure: Portraits from Death Row (1996), and photography educator.

[35] Boston news photographer and camera salesman Gordon A. Hicks is the longest-known club member at 71 years, 1938-2009.

In the first Joint Exhibition, held in New York City in 1887, Joseph P. Loud and Horace A. Latimer received the Boston club's only diplomas.

[43] After its revival by Horace Latimer's 1931 bequest, in 1932 the club launched an international competition, the Boston Salon of Photography, held 43 times over the next five decades.

Whereas earlier salons typically received hundreds of entries each, the 1981 exhibition took a man-year of labor to process over 3,200 prints and slides.

[45] Entrants of note in the Boston Salon and International Exhibition over the years include Croatian photographer Toso Dabac, the 1937 medal winner.

Competing by the 9th Salon in 1940 were Eleanor Parke Custis, and amateur photographer and future U.S. senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Noted pictorialist and longtime Baltimore Sun photographer A. Aubrey Bodine, competing by 1944, received the first Fraprie medal in 1953, winning it again in 1955 and 1959.

There was also longtime competitor Wellington Lee, who competed from 1950 to the last salon in 1981; Hong Kong-American photo prodigy, actor, and director Fan Ho, who first competed in 1954 at age 17; and Mexican cinema director Jos‚ Lorenzo Zakany Almada, who won the Boston Camera Club Medal in 1968.

In 2021 the club mounted an outdoor exhibition, showing its members' work on a wall in Boston's Seaport district, in collaboration with community organizations.

In 1899 it had shows by major figures Frances Benjamin Johnston[46] and Clarence White, the latter organized and hung by Fred Holland Day.

In 1907 there was an exhibition by physiologist and educator Frederick Haven Pratt, a friend of Fred Holland Day and Member of the Photo-Secession.

In discharging the mandate of its 1887 state charter to promulgate the "knowledge of photography," the Boston Camera Club has sponsored lectures and programs by expert members and guests.

In 1904, likely at his studio during the club's aforementioned show there, Fred Holland Day presented a paper for which he was well known, "Is Photography a Fine Art?

[59] In the 1940s the club brought entertainment and instruction to disabled World War II veterans at a Boston-area Army hospital.