The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1949 — present
The trade after the directory ends: Beatty's directory closes in 1930, and the studio record after it rests on thinner paper, but two careers bridge it. Paul Watters, a 1947 graduate of Central High School, began in photography in 1949 at the A & I Leather & Camera Shop, buying his first camera that year — a Crown Graphic 4×5, the press camera of the era. From 1950 he kept three studios in succession, at 2223 Miner Street, 3121 South Calhoun Street, and 3635 Lake Avenue, doing weddings and commercial work; after 1972 he turned to portraiture with a concentration on school photography, the trade's great late-century staple, and retired in 2000. The History Center's account of him calls it "a 50 year legacy of premium photography in Fort Wayne." In January 2011 Watters donated the Crown Graphic he had bought in 1949 to the History Center — the working tool of a fifty-year Fort Wayne career, filed in the same institution that holds Schanz's glass plates.
The contemporary end of the line is Daniel A. Baker, a Fort Wayne photographer of the present day whose work includes the "then and now" pairings of Fort Wayne Through Time (2018), made with historian Randolph L. Harter, matching modern views against images reaching back to the 1890s. Hundreds of Baker's Fort Wayne photographs have been donated to the Allen County Public Library, where they form the Daniel A. Baker Photograph Collection in the library's digital collections — the current generation of the city's photographers depositing its work in the same archive that preserves the daguerreians' city, closing a circle this section opened in 1843.
Sources:
- The History Center — account of Paul Watters and his Crown Graphic donation of January 2011, as carried on the Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana's W-surnames biographical page.
- Allen County Public Library, Digital Collections — the Daniel A. Baker Photograph Collection description; Randolph L. Harter and Daniel A. Baker, Fort Wayne Through Time (2018).