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Alvan S. Harper was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania in 1847. Between
1870 and 1884, he was a professional photographer in Philadelphia. A chance
meeting with Judge J. T. Bernard of Tallahassee, who was in Philadelphia
as a commissioner from Florida to the 1876 Centennial Exposition, may
have led to Harper's move to Tallahassee in 1884.
Harper was soon advertising that he would take "artistic photographs"
in his first studio, a room in the house he was renting. He moved twice
before buying a house and building his own studio, where he worked between
1889 and his death in 1911.
Some of Harper's best negatives were lost when his studio was torn down
in the 1920s. The negatives had been given to a Tallahassee history buff
who, because they were dirty, left them on a porch where they were mistaken
for trash and taken to the dump.
About 2,000 more Harper negatives were found in 1946 in the attic of
the house he had owned. A Tallahassee photographer printed 250 negatives
and circulated the prints throughout the community for identification.
The negatives were turned over the State Library and transferred to the
Florida Photographic Collection when it was founded in 1952. The balance
of the negatives was to remain unprinted and unseen until 1977 when the
Historic Tallahassee Preservation Board helped finance a six-month printing
project.
In 1982, the Florida State University Press, in co-sponsorship with
the State's historical agency, published 125 Harper prints in The
Photographs of Alvan S. Harper, Tallahassee, 1885-1910, edited by
Joan Perry Morris and Lee H. Warner. An exhibit of forty-five of Harper's
photographs in the Florida Photographic Collection is available through
the raveling exhibit program of the Museum of Florida History.
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