| Biography | | Wikipedia: "H. H. Bennett was born in Farnham, Lower Canada, but was raised in Brattleboro, Vermont. In 1857, Bennett moved with his father and uncle to Wisconsin. The group settled in Kilbourn City, today known as Wisconsin Dells, and Henry worked as a carpenter in the town. After the outbreak of the American Civil War, Bennett joined the army and fought in the Battle of Vicksburg before being severely wounded by the accidental discharge of his own gun. After the war, the wound prevented Bennett from returning to carpentry, so in 1865 he bought a Kilbourn City photography studio and began a career as a photographer. Shortly afterward, in 1866, he married Francis Douty, and the couple eventually had three children. Later, after Francis died (in 1884), he remarried Evaline Marshall in 1890.
Because there was little demand for portraits in the area, Bennett set his sights on landscape photography. He built himself a portable darkroom, and then towed it, his camera, and other necessary equipment with him across the local countryside taking pictures. He didn't have to go far to find impressive scenery, for the Wisconsin River Dells, a gorge with numerous sandstone formations, was just outside Kilbourn City. Bennett loaded a boat with his photographic equipment and took many pictures of the Dells. Realizing that the three dimensional aspect of the rock formations would be lost in two-dimensional photographs, he began creating stereoscopic images that allowed viewers to see the Dells in three dimensions. Bennett made his first stereoscopic photo in 1868, and they soon became very popular, being sold in cities across the United States.
Innovations in photography
As people across the country saw more and more of Bennett's photographs of the Wisconsin Dells, they began to flock to Kilbourn City to see the rock formations in person. The area quickly became a destination for sightseers eager to leave behind the bustle of the city. Bennett capitalized on this, building the H. H. Bennett Studio in 1875 and using it to sell postcards and souvenir portraits to travelers. In the meantime, he continued to innovate in the field of photography by inventing a stop action shutter which allowed him to take photographs of instantaneous events. Previously, it took several minutes for a camera to take a picture, and any movement of the subject being photographed over this time caused the picture to become blurry.
After Bennett created the new shutter, he was able to take clear pictures of moving subjects. The best known photograph taken by Bennett with this device was an 1886 image of his son Ashley jumping between two rock formations in the Dells. Boston audiences of 1890 gasped when this photograph was projected as a magic lantern slide. Bennett also introduced narrative concepts, as noted by his great-granddaughter, Betsy Reese Grant, in The Bennett Story:
From 1832 until 1890, every spring saw raftsmen riding their lumber to market down the Wisconsin River. Bennett had always been interested in taking a series of pictures of their activities. In 1886 dry plates had finally become reliable enough that he did not need his portable darkroom. Henry and his son Ashley made a 100-mile, week-long trip on a lumber raft. Between Kilbourn and Boscobel, Wisconsin, he took 30 pictures of the raftsmen's different activities. He then combined these with other pictures taken near Kilbourn and called the series, The Story of Raftsmen's Life on the Wisconsin. This was the first time a photographer wrote a "story" with pictures. Photo journalism was born.[2]
Bennett also innovated in the way he printed pictures, building a revolving solar printing house that is now housed at the Smithsonian Institution. In addition, because early cameras were unable to accurately capture details of the sky or reflections in water after being adjusted for the light of a typical land photograph, Bennett wove together negatives from multiple photographs of land, sky and water before creating a final print. Bennett received much attention for his advanced techniques, and was commissioned by the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad to photograph the landscape along the company's track in Wisconsin. Bennett also took pictures outside the state, photographing an ice palace in St. Paul, Minnesota and the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.
As portable film cameras became widespread in the 1890s, Bennett's career declined somewhat because tourists coming to see the Dells were able to take their own souvenir photos and no longer needed Bennett's postcards or portraits. Nevertheless, Bennett pressed on in his profession, selling gift shop type items from his studio to attract more customers and continuing as a professional landscape photographer until his death in 1908. Following his death, Bennett's family took over the photography studio, remodeling it in 1917. His descendants continued to operate the studio until 1999, when the building was restored to its 1908 appearance and became a historic site operated by the Wisconsin Historical Society."
Getty Museum: "His right hand crippled from a wound suffered during the Civil War and seeking a new career, Henry Hamilton Bennett bought a photographic studio in his hometown of Kilbourn, Wisconsin (later renamed Wisconsin Dells). He built most of his own equipment, from his camera to a stereograph-mounting machine. Ever the inventor, he developed an instantaneous shutter that allowed him to stop action and built a solar printing house on iron rollers, now at the Smithsonian Institution, that could be rotated 280 degrees so that the printing racks could face the sun all day. With his first and second wives and five children, he ran the Bennett Studio from 1865 until 1908. That studio is still run by his descendents today.
Summing up his career, Bennett wrote that his "energies for near a lifetime have been used almost entirely to win such prominence as [he] could in outdoor photography." He was renowned as a landscape photographer who presented the Wisconsin Dells, now a major resort area, as a safe though untamed wilderness. In his zeal to represent his beloved landscape, Bennett was said to have engaged in a bit of deceit, such as whitewashing the interiors of caves to make their interiors visible on early glass plate negatives. "
"Henry Hamilton Bennett ran his photography studio with the assistance of his family. He photographed himself with three of his children in the drawing room, which conspicuously displays two paintings and a sculpture of what appears to be a Civil War subject. The inclusion of the fine arts in an otherwise sparsely furnished room with worn floors and plain walls shows the importance of art to Bennett and this photographer's desire to align himself with the traditional arts.
A painted landscape hangs on the wall directly above Bennett's head. He was a committed landscape photographer and land conservationist, so his symbolic placement under this image hints at his ambitions and interests. Furthering the connection between aesthetic contemplation and Bennett's profession, the daughter seated next to him seems to be perusing a photograph album, emphasizing both family unity and professional affirmation. "
Shutterbug:
Henry Hamilton Bennett’s photographs have been collected and displayed in some of the most prestigious museums around the world, including the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress. His original photographs have found their way into many private collections.
In 1999, Bennett’s granddaughter Jean Dyer Reese and her husband Oliver gifted the 1875 building that housed Bennett’s studio, original photographic equipment, and the entire collection of rare, historic glass negatives and prints to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Much thought and attention to detail went into the creation of this unique museum celebrating Bennett’s life, making it truly a little “gem” when it opened to the public in June 2000. Now visitors can “Journey into the Past,” wander past large murals of his photographs, and discover the natural splendor of the Wisconsin Dells through his eyes. Using the latest technology in computerized digital stereo imaging, developed for NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission, and special viewing glasses, with liquid crystal lenses, visitors can view Bennett’s three-dimensional stereo images that mesmerized Americans more than a century ago.
Loaded with nostalgia, Bennett’s enormous handcrafted camera and other memorabilia are everywhere. The now silent, dimly lit darkroom echoes the past, where he and his family spent countless hours churning out thousands of prints from glass-plate negatives. Bennett family portraits hang on the walls of the portrait studio where a huge camera on a stand, draped with a black cloth, stands sentinel. The once bustling sales room is filled with his photographs and personal items that tell us about this remarkable man.
A Life In Photography
Henry Hamilton, the oldest of 12 children, was born to George and Harriet Bennett on January 15, 1843, at his grandparents’ farm near Quebec, Canada. The family returned to their home in Brattleboro, Vermont, where Henry spent his early boyhood.
In 1857, economic hardship, and the prospect of a brighter future, brought 14-year-old Henry, his father, and his Uncle George Houghton to Kilbourn City, Wisconsin. The recently constructed Milwaukee to Minneapolis railroad passed through here, creating jobs, and Henry became a carpenter. He also had a brief exposure to photography while assisting Uncle George in his daguerreotype studio. Finding business unprofitable, George relocated it back to Vermont.
The Civil War broke in April 1861. Believing in the cause and aware that his great-grandfather Aaron Bennett was killed during the bloody battle at Valley Forge (while serving as aide to General George Washington), he decided to pursue a military career. Henry, now 18, enlisted on September 8, 1861.
Fate intervened, when on April 17, 1864, his rifle accidentally discharged, permanently disabling his right hand. Returning home to Kilbourn City, and unable to resume carpentry, Henry was compelled to seek a new livelihood. He bought Leroy Gates’ photo business in 1865, and embarked on a career that spanned more than 40 years. He found a new calling: Photography!
The Tourist Trade
Using Gates’ old tintype cameras, Henry set up his photo tent down by the steamboat landing, ready to photograph visitors prior to their boat trips along the Wisconsin River to see the strange rock formations. While they were gone, he quickly developed the tinplate sheets, coating them with a wet collodion solution before transferring the positive image onto coated metal sheets. Returning a few hours later, he had prints ready for the delighted tourists to take home as souvenirs.
In the late 1860s, photography, still in its infancy, was not a lucrative vocation and Henry faced hard times. Now married, he and his wife Frances (Frankie) had two young children, daughter Hattie and a son Ashley Clayton. Unable to make ends meet, and very depressed, Henry seriously considered shutting the business and asked Uncle George in Vermont for a job. His uncle replied, saying that he had sold his portrait studio, and advised his nephew to “…give up the business and never touch it again…”
Recording The Land
Fortunately Henry opted not to follow his uncle’s advice. Instead, to supplement their income, he leased Gates’ old building for $12.50 a month, set up a small portrait studio in town, and taught Frankie to handle this part of the business, including developing and printing the wet-plate negatives in the darkroom. This freed him up to be able to concentrate on the growing demand for landscape photography. In addition to the tourists, he began photographing the local landscape, and toiled countless hours, tirelessly trudging up and down the narrow gorges and ravines along the Wisconsin River, giving them colorful names, still in use today, like Witches Gulch, Coldwater Canyon, and Fat Man’s Misery. He fell in love with the wild scenery around Kilbourn City, which was renamed “The Wisconsin Dells” in 1931.
“Dells,” derived from the French word “dalles,” means slab-like rocks. Five hundred million years ago, during the Cambrian era, these ancient prehistoric soft sandstone rocks lay at the bottom of a vast inland sea that covered the Midwest. About 12,000 years ago, the Ice Age ended and as the climate warmed an ice barrier holding back a large lake suddenly ruptured, causing unimaginable havoc. A massive surge of flood waters and swift currents carried rocks, boulders, and sediment through what today is the Wisconsin River Valley, carving deep canyons and steep rocky bluffs. It all happened within a few weeks, creating the strange geological landscape of the Dells.
In 1863, naturalist John Muir visited this area. He was captivated by the “glorious tangled valleys and lofty perpendicular rocks,” saying that “we cannot remove such places to our homes, but they cut themselves into our memories and remain pictured in us forever.” Like Muir, Henry was enchanted by this rugged wilderness, which became the backdrop for his spectacular landscape images that made time stand still. The Dells became his photographic canvas for the rest of his life.
Undaunted by the physical challenge, Henry hauled around colossal cameras, a portable darkroom, delicate wet-glass plates, chemicals, and water, across the harsh terrain photographing the lofty sandstone bluffs and narrow, dark ravines, which required long exposures. He often made two exposures, one with a full plate and the other with his stereographic camera. Soon he had thousands of views of the Dells, which he marketed nationwide through sales agents.
Henry made all his own equipment. Excluding the lens, which he purchased, his carpentry training proved very useful, enabling him to craft extremely fine precision cameras designed specifically for his needs. Stereo photography was now at its height and he built his earliest cameras using cigar boxes fitted with two lenses. He also constructed a camera with a tilting back for perspective control, and in 1871, before the advent of electricity, he built a solar camera specifically to make enlargements from negatives using sunlight.
An Appetite For Images
By the 1870s, Americans had an insatiable appetite to see the newly explored wilderness, and stereoscopic landscape photography brought these frontiers vividly into their living rooms. These were made by two identical frames taken a few inches apart, then mounted side by side on cardboard and, when viewed through a stereoscope, they created a three-dimensional effect. The impact and realism of Henry’s stereo images of the haunting rock sculptures of the Wisconsin Dells fed the public’s craving for dramatic landscapes, equal to any they had seen. Tourism to the Dells began.
Orders poured in and Henry’s studio turned out over 20,000 prints per month. To speed up production of his stereographs, he designed a foot-operated machine that automatically die-cut, reversed, and mounted his prints in a one-step process, enabling him to produce several hundred prints a day. Henry never imagined the impact his photographs would have in attracting tourists to the Wisconsin Dells, including famous people, like General Ulysses S. Grant and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, referred to as the “lady in black” by the local press.
Henry was now nationally recognized as one of the leading photographers in the country. William Metcalf, a wealthy resident of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and a personal friend of Oliver Wendell Holmes, was also an enthusiastic amateur photographer and admired Henry’s photographic skills. He became Henry’s mentor and the two became lifelong friends. Metcalf provided financing for Henry to construct a new studio building in 1875, and after many financially difficult years, Henry and Frankie finally felt that life had taken a turn for the better.
This new location at 215 Broadway gave a significant boost to Henry’s career. An elegantly decorated sales room where customers were received led to the spacious “operating room,” or portrait studio, where a large skylight provided diffused lighting. A darkroom and a workroom, outfitted with a small press for imprinting titles, and the “Bennett Studio” name on all his photographs rounded off this efficient and profitable business. To complete his impressive setup was a unique solar printing room, constructed on a raised circular platform behind the main studio. Positioned on circular tracks, this room, with a row of windows along one side, could be rotated to face the sun all day for making prints.
Frankie, who had been sick for sometime, died on August 28, 1884, at the age of 36. Depressed and overcome with loneliness, Henry found solace in his work. He built an 18x22” camera and a heavy wooden tripod to support it. Used exclusively for his landscape photography, it produced incredibly sharp negatives, perfect for making large contact prints.
Wisconsin Dells. Stand Rock today, where H.H. Bennett took one of his first stop-action shots more than 100 years ago of his son Ashley jumping. These rocks were formed by rushing flood waters at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000-15,000 years ago. Stand Rock has become the trademark of the Wisconsin Dells.
Photo Courtesy “Wisconsin Historical Society” and “H.H. Bennett Studio & History Center.”
Panoramic Exhibitions
Henry began exhibiting panoramic views taken with the 18x22” camera. Three separate contact prints were spliced together so precisely that it was impossible to detect the joint, even on close scrutiny. The final prints were 18” wide and 5 ft long, the largest contact prints ever made, and were displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876. In March 1885, Henry’s stereo views were displayed at the New Orleans Exposition and in September at the Milwaukee Exposition. He was invited to photograph special events like the “Ice Palace” at the Winter Carnival in Minneapolis and Chicago’s panoramic paintings of the Gettysburg Cyclorama of 1893.
Stop-Action Shots
By now Henry was obsessed with the idea of stop-action photography and he began experimenting with various designs, using springs and rubber bands. In 1886, he tested his instant shutter-release device, which he affectionately called the “snapper,” and it worked. His stop-action midair photograph of a lumber raft man throwing a rope from a raft, and another of son Ashley leaping 5 1/2 ft across a 40-foot-deep chasm at Stand Rock, were probably the first two stop-action shots ever made. Believing this impossible, some of his peers thought he had manipulated these in his darkroom.
A new attraction also arrived at Henry’s studio, a stereopticon, for projecting black and white glass positives onto a screen. Like a magnet, it drew visitors to his studio, eager to watch his “magic lantern” shows, which brought the stunning landscapes of the Dells to life. Occasionally Henry used two lantern projectors simultaneously to accomplish a dissolving effect very much like today’s slide shows, thrilling his audience. One slide, which never failed to amaze, was Henry’s son Ashley’s leap across the chasm.
Henry was invited to give lantern shows in many cities including Chicago, New York, and Boston. In February 1896, he presented a lantern slide show at the Northwest Photographer’s Association Convention in Minneapolis, which received rave reviews. A highly impressed Oliver Wendell Holmes said, after an outstanding performance in Milwaukee, that “…to sit in the darkness and have these visions of strange cities, of stately edifices, of lovely scenery, of noble statues, steal out upon the consciousness and melt away one with another, is like dreaming a long beautiful dream with eyes wide-open.”
Mass-Market Changes
Big changes in photography had already been set in motion with the appearance of George Eastman’s first Kodak camera in 1888. Mass-produced, these ultra-simple box cameras with a fixed-focus 27mm f/9 lens came pre-loaded with a 100-exposure roll of film for $25. Customers shipped the camera with exposed film back to the Eastman plant where their pictures were printed, attractively mounted, and returned loaded with a fresh roll of film. The cost was $10. The first photofinishing service had been born and, like Eastman said, “You press the button. We do the rest!” By 1900, the Kodak Brownie camera cost $1, came with a instruction book, and was extremely affordable. Photography was now at a crossroads and within the reach of many Americans, and the age of “snapshots” was born. Tourists still came to the Dells, but now they brought their own cameras. Henry’s business slowed and ironically, son Ashley left the business and joined the Eastman Kodak Company in 1894 as a traveling salesman.
After Henry died on January 1, 1908, his widow Evaline, along with his daughters, continued to run the business, which was subsequently inherited by his children and grandchildren. They made prints for sale using Henry’s original negatives. In 1976, recognized as the oldest family owned and operated photographic business in the US, the Bennett Studio was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1978, Henry’s revolving printing room, solar enlarger, along with a few valuable glass plates were placed in the Smithsonian Institution.
Be Sure To Visit
Looking back 100 years, when busy Broadway was little more than a dirt road, one can almost visualize Bennett, trudging back to his studio at dusk, exhausted but exhilarated from a successful day’s shoot.
Visitors can take home a special Bennett souvenir. A wide selection of affordably priced, original handmade prints, made from second-generation negatives in the darkroom attached to the museum are on sale. Each print is matted and mounted, with H.H. Bennett’s signature stamped in gold leaf, a tradition he started more than a century ago, during photography’s golden era.
The H.H. Bennett Studio & History Center is located in the heart of Wisconsin Dells at 215 Broadway. It is owned and operated by the Wisconsin Historical Society. For information on visiting hours and more, visit www.wisconsinhistory.org/hhbennett.3,4 |
