I am a member of the Kent Archaeological Society and researching pioneer woman photographer Catherine Weed Barnes (or Catherine Weed Barnes Ward as she became when she married Henry Snowden Ward, photographic journalist and publisher). Mr Ward was a founder member of the Dickens Fellowship and died in 1911 in the USA while lecturing on Dickens and photography. Mrs Ward died in 1913. The lived at Golden Green in Kent.
In 1904 HSW wrote and published a book entitled "The Real Dickens Land with an Outline of Dickens's Life", illustrated with CWBW's photographs of places associated with Dickens' novels.
The KAS has a collection of glass plate negatives of such places, provenance unrecorded, but some of them match the images in the book, leaving little doubt that they are CWBW's original negatives or copies of same. One of the negatives is captioned:
2523 Cosmos Pictures Co New York
Ball Room Bull Inn Rochester (see Dickens' Pickwick Papers)
Negative by Catherine Weed Barnes Ward
Copyrighted 1901 by Cosmos Pictures Co NY
Ball Room Bull Inn Rochester (see Dickens' Pickwick Papers)
Negative by Catherine Weed Barnes Ward
Copyrighted 1901 by Cosmos Pictures Co NY
By the last years of her life Catherine had a collection of 10,000 negatives and I'm trying to find out what became of them. I would be pleased to hear from anyone who knows of the whereabouts of any of the Wards' photographic materials, research documents, etc.
Comments
I worked at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, some years ago and I recall that the photo collection includes a large holding of Catharine Weed Barnes material, though I don't remember the details. Contact the museum's photo archivist, Joe Struble, at jost@geh.org