A City at Work

Download or read book A City at Work written by Tim Olson and published by . This book was released on 1919-10-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early June, 1912, at least two photographers arrived in Dubuque, Iowa, and began shooting the photographs that today make up the Klauer Collection. For three weeks they traveled through the city with a large format camera and a magnesium powder flash lamp, photographing workers in factories, offices, saloons, pool halls, ice cream parlors, and even an operating room at the dawn of antiseptic surgery. The individual photographs they produced are, for the most part, objective, straightforward, documentary portraits of workers and the rooms or factory floors they occupy-fascinating but not always flattering. We see the mustaches, the sleeve protectors, the spittoons, the tin ceilings, the Miss Remington calendar, dizzying wallpaper patterns, bountiful taxidermy, and the price of a chopped ham sandwich all in amazing clarity. Fortunately, before the photographers moved on to their next project in the next town, they sold the roughly 500 glass plate negatives they had made in Dubuque to Peter Klauer, the President of the Klauer Manufacturing Company. The plates remained in storage- occasionally thumbed through by the curious, but mostly forgotten. In the 1980s, William Klauer, Peter's grandson, donated a set of contact prints to the Loras College Center for Dubuque History, and later he generously gave all of the remaining glass plate negatives to the College. This collection of prints and negatives is now known as the William J. Klauer, Sr. Collection, and visitors to the Center can view all of the photographs. Thumbnail images can be viewed at: digitalcollections.loars.edu/. This volume reproduces some of the best photos from the collection and also includes essays on history, Dubuque, photography and backgrounds on the individuals and locations depicted.