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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.
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| Self-portrait
of photographer Alvan S. Harper: Tallahassee, Florida |
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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 historian
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 in the community for
identification. The negatives were turned over to the State Library and
transferred to the Florida Photographic Collection after it was founded
in 1952.
The Alvan
S. Harper collection consists
of the surviving glass negatives of noted portrait photographer Alvan S.
Harper.
The collection includes
about 200 portraits of Philadelphia people, some identified; about 100
views of Tallahassee buildings and street scenes, along with a few from
Monticello, Quincy, St. Marks, and Panacea; and about 1,300 portraits
of groups and individual men, women, and children, mostly unidentified.
Included in those are the portraits of middle class African Americans
that were used for this exhibit. |
