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Lawrence Denny Lindsley PhotographsThis collection represents the landscape and nature photography of Laurence Denny Lindsley. During his career as a photographer, woodsman, wilderness guide, and miner, Lindsley took thousands of photographs of Washington State including scenes around Mount Rainier and the Cascade Mountains, Eastern Washington, and the Pacific Ocean beaches on the Olympic Peninsula. Using a discerning eye, Lindsley captured images of extraordinary geologic formations in the Grand Coulee region, cloud formations, mountain storms, wildflowers, and historic images of steamboats and settlements around Lake Chelan. Also included are family pictures Lindsley collected of his relatives, the Denny family, one of Seattle's earliest pioneer familes. Presented here in digital format are only a selection of the more than 5000 images in the Lawrence D. Lindsley Photograph Collection. Lawrence Denny Lindsley was born in 1878 in a house on Lake Union built by his grandfather, Seattle pioneer, David Denny. His parents were Abbie Denny and Edward L. Lindsley. As a child and young adult, he grew up in the "outdoors". Cultivating a woodsman's keen power of observation, Lawrence learned to hunt deer on the summit of Queen Anne in Seattle. He took up photography at an early age, and later in life, combined it with work as a miner, hunter, guide and student of nature. In 1895, Lindsley went to work in the Esther mine near Gold Creek in the Snoqualmie Pass area and later worked on the first road along Lake Keechelus. He became a charter member of the Mountaineers in 1907. Lindsley went to work in the Romans photography studio in Seattle in 1903 and owned part interest in the studio when it was bought by Asahel Curtis in 1910. This association led him also to work for Edward Curtis, where Lindsley developed some of the color negatives, "the gold tones", for Curtis's famous "Indians of North America" series. Sometime, between 1910 and 1914 Lindsley moved to Lake Chelan where he lived for several years on land owned by his parents. During those years he was employed by the Great Northern Railroad to photograph Glacier National Park for the railroad's tourist literature. He also began his extensive photographic study of Lake Chelan and the coulees of Central Washington, often photographing the landscape on horseback while hand-holding a tripod. In these Chelan years and later, Lindsley worked as a guide, leading parties along the lake and into the Stehekin wilderness. In 1916 the railroad sent him as a guide for the party of Mary Roberts Rinehart, a popular author, through the Lake Chelan Country. Lindsley figured prominently as, Silent Lawrie, along with his faithful horse Peanut, as a character in her novel, "Tenting Tonight". In 1916 Lindsley returned to Seattle and resumed work in the Curtis Studio. He married in 1918, but his wife and infant daughter died in 1920. Throughout the 1920s, Lindsley worked in the Curtis Studio and continued his landscape and nature photography. At this time, he perfected his technique of lantern slide photography. Lindsley liked to blend one frame into another, taking as many as eleven shots to capture sequentially, cloud movements, birds nesting, or waves breaking on a shore. He mastered the blending of frames in the thousands of pictures he took of Mt. Rainier, the Lake Chelan region, and the beach at La Push, Washington. During his lifetime, Lindsley probably photographed Mount Rainier more often than any other photographer. In 1933 when the Washington State Federation of Garden Clubs was formed, his lantern slide lectures became a favorite among members of the garden clubs. Lindsley continued to use colored lantern throughout his career. Unable to support himself solely by photography, Lindsley spent many years working mining claims around Snoqualmie Pass and Gold Creek. However, he was not fond of the mining life and the labor it entailed: building cabins, drill sharpening, and packing out ore by arduous journey across Snoqulamie Pass. Even so, he describes getting up in the middle of a night storm to photograph images of "lightning rumbling against the mountains". In 1944 Lindsley married and with his wife, a coloring artist, set up a shop in their home, which they operated until her death in 1960. Lindsley continued to photograph into his 90s. He died in 1974. About the DatabaseThe Lawrence Denny Lindsley Photographs database was produced partially by funding from the Olympic Peninsula Virtual Community Museum project. Selection, research and descriptive metadata were completed by Kristin Kinsey, Lauren Manes, Lorraine Thomas and grant staff in 2005-6. Only selected photographs were included in this database. The images were scanned in grayscale using Microtek scanners and saved in .jpg format. Some manipulation of the images was done to present the clearest possible digital image. The scanned images were then linked with descriptive data using the UW Contentdm program. The original collection resides in the UW Libraries Special Collections Division as the Lawrence Denny Lindsley Photographs PH Coll 548. |
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