Norman Studio
The Norman Studio in photography refers to the family business run principally by photographers Henry C. Norman (1850-1913) and his son Earl Norman (1888-1951) in Natchez, Mississippi, United States between 1876 and 1951, which produced around 75,000 images documenting many significant types of events and subjects in the various small towns along the lower Mississippi River. Its output remains one of the most valuable and comprehensive visual collection of Southern American life from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The surviving Norman Studio photographs currently reside in the Lower Mississippi Valley Collection of the libraries of Louisiana State University.
History
The Norman Studio’s history dates to before the American Civil War. It was founded by local Natchez photographer Henry D. Gurney and his brother Marsh, who were two of the first photographers permanently based in Mississippi, having been operating in Natchez since 1851—a mere twelve years after the medium itself had even been invented in France by Louis Daguerre. In 1870, the twenty-year-old Henry Norman arrived in Natchez by steamboat from Louisville, Kentucky, where he and his mother had moved from Georgia, possibly following the death of Norman’s father. Norman found a job working in Gurney’s studio, and when the latter retired in 1876, Norman bought out the business, including Gurney’s equipment.
Norman soon set about becoming one of the most prolific and sought-after photographers in the lower Mississippi Valley. He established his studio in downtown Natchez on the second floor of a handsome brick building with a cast-iron ground floor storefront. Norman’s skill handling a camera meant that he was called upon over the next thirty-five years to document large numbers of people and events in the area, among both the white and African-American citizenry. He was well-known for his portraiture, but Norman was not merely a studio man or a simple toiler at the disposal of every person who called. He frequently took his camera out with him to produce candid images of people in the streets or hard at work, along with children at play or resting in the grass on the bluffs high above the Mississippi River, the effects of inclement weather such as the floods that sometimes plagued the low-lying towns and the Natchez wharf, and exciting daily events such as the arrival of trains at the railroad station or visits by dignitaries, including the 1909 stop in Natchez by then-President of the United States William Howard Taft.
Norman married and had three sons, all of whom eventually became photographers. Only the youngest, Earl, born in 1888, stayed to work with his father, and at only 25 years of age he inherited the studio when Henry died. For the next thirty-eight years, Earl continued upon the foundations that his father had built, until his own death in 1951. Upon Earl Norman’s death, the glass negatives and resultant positives essentially sat around collecting dust for the better part of the next decade, until they were all purchased, along with the remaining photography equipment, from his widow in 1961 by Thomas W. Gandy, a Natchez physician and local history buff, and his wife Joan. The Gandys then began the arduous task of cleaning the items and determining which of them were still usable and viewable. The Gandys then selected the best of the lot and published them in several books with accompanying commentary during the 1970s and 1980s, giving the balance of the collection to Louisiana State University and then donating the rest after the publication of the books. LSU as of 2018 has scanned a small portion of the photographs and made them available for viewing online.
Scope of the Collection
As noted above, the Gurneys and Normans photographed a very wide variety of subjects. Perhaps the most significant portions of the collection are the images of scores of steamboats that proved vital to the region’s economic recovery in the decades of Reconstruction and the subsequent prosperity that sustained Natchez as one of Mississippi’s most important cities well into the twentieth century. Despite their familiarity and importance to commerce in mid-continent America throughout the Victorian and Edwardian era, many of these vessels were never captured on negatives or film, and the Normans’ photographs remain, in some cases, the only surviving images of them, especially since steamboats were notoriously prone to natural or man-made disasters and might only last a few years or less.
A similar charge might be made about much of the built environment of Natchez that has been subject to dramatic change during the twentieth century. Much of the surviving visual documentation of commercial and residential buildings in and around Natchez lost to alterations, demolition, or disasters can be found in the Norman Studio's production. Included in this must also be the visual documentation of the former city of Bayou Sara, Louisiana, south of Natchez, now virtually abandoned in favor of the higher ground of St. Francisville after repeated floods made habitation along the river's course impracticable.
The Normans and Gurneys documented all facets of life in and around Natchez. Their surviving output includes diverse subject matter from panoramic views of the town taken from the steeple of St. Mary's (Catholic) Cathedral (now a minor basilica), to parties aboard barges and steamboats on the Mississippi River, to storefronts, to workers hauling cotton and other harvested crops to market, to ordinary street activity and gamblers playing card games.
Photographic Methods
The Norman Studio was proficient in many types of photography as the medium evolved. They include:
- Daguerreotypes
- Ferrotypes
- Wet and dry glass-plate collodion negatives
- Film negatives
Publications
- Gandy, Joan and Thomas. Norman’s Natchez: An Early Photographer and his Town (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978).
- ________. Natchez Victorian Children: Photographic Portraits, 1865-1915 (Myrtle Beach: Myrtle Beach Press, 1981).
- ________. The Mississippi Steamboat Era in Historic Photographs: Natchez to New Orleans, 1870-1920 (New York: Dover, 1987).