The press photographers

1909 — 2013

The papers bought pictures before they hired men to make them: Edward Perrey, in the entry above, was often contracted by the local newspapers for photographs a generation before either paper kept a staff photographer. The first Fort Wayne newsman the record remembers as a photographer is Karl Detzer, born in Fort Wayne on 4 September 1891, who worked as a reporter and photographer for Fort Wayne newspapers from 1909 to 1916 before a Chicago advertising career, a stretch as a Hollywood screenwriter and technical director in 1934–36, and national fame as a freelance writer. In 1926 the commercial firm of Gardner & Neuman — Bruce C. Gardner and Walter W. Neuman — kept a studio at 1121 Broadway and another inside the News-Sentinel Building; a studio housed in the paper's building was a tenant's arrangement, not a staff job, and it is stated as such.

The named staff man of the Journal Gazette is Dailey M. Fogle. A former Churubusco resident, he was the paper's longtime staff photographer; credits in the record include a rooftop view carried in the Journal Gazette of 14 April 1975 and a "STAFF PHOTO BY DAILEY FOGLE" line in the issue of 14 June 1981. He died in May 2013, aged ninety-one, under the headline "Longtime JG photographer Dailey Fogle dies at 91." The News-Sentinel's share of the trade's honors is in this history's Awards section: the paper's 1983 Pulitzer Prize for its flood coverage was a staff award, and two of the staff photographers who shared in it, Dennis Chamberlin and Carl Hartup, are named there; the retelling belongs to that section, not this one.

The papers also trained a man who carried the craft to the top of it. Chip Somodevilla, born in Texas in 1972 and educated at the University of North Texas, spent nine years at daily newspapers including the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel — the paper's own archived feature on the old portage path, published in 2000, names "News-Sentinel photographer Chip Somodevilla" — the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the Detroit Free Press, before joining Getty Images as a senior staff photographer in Washington in 2005–06. He was the White House News Photographers Association's Photographer of the Year in 2010 and the National Press Photographers Association's Photographer of the Year in 2019, and he stood on the Getty team named finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.

And the pictures the city is known by: the credited landmarks of Fort Wayne photography are Charles Stevens's blockhouse daguerreotype of 1852, Charles Miner's courthouse-opening series of 1902, and Felix Schanz's postcards of the 1916 centennial. Its greatest disaster was photographed in bulk and credited in fragments. The Allen County Public Library's digital collections hold more than 120 photographs of the March 1913 flood; the makers of most are unrecorded. The credits that survive name the Wayne Studio — Fred C. Rowell and Elbridge P. Cloud's firm, opened in the Citizens Trust Building in 1911 and sold the next year to H. W. Herrman — on a Wells Street flood view, and a postcard of the flooded Wayne Knitting Mills dated 25 March 1913 carries the credit "Wiegman Photo." No Wiegman appears anywhere in Beatty's directory; the name stands in this record as a credit only, a maker the directories never caught.

Sources:

1. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, D-surnames biographical page — Karl Detzer, Fort Wayne newspaper reporter and photographer, 1909–1916.
2. John D. Beatty, Directory of Fort Wayne Photographers 1843–1930 — entries for Bruce C. Gardner, Edward F. Perrey, and the Wayne Studio.
3. Journal Gazette, 15 May 2013 — "Longtime JG photographer Dailey Fogle dies at 91"; Journal-Gazette issues of 14 April 1975 and 14 June 1981 (staff credits); Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, F-surnames biographical page — Dailey M. Fogle.
4. Northern Short Course in Photojournalism, speaker biography — Chip Somodevilla; the News-Sentinel's archived "Path to the past" portage feature (2000), naming him as the paper's photographer.
5. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, "1913 Flood" photographs page, and Allen County Public Library Digital Collections — the flood photograph holdings and the Wayne Studio credit (item FWFV00085A); Indiana Memory — "Flood Scene at Wayne Knitting Mills, March 25, 1913, Wiegman Photo."