Washington Blake, the Cute Studio, and a name the record does not finish

1904 — 1941

One address, three hands, one borrowed name: Washington Blake was a Missouri native, born about 1861, who had worked as a photographer in Indiana and Michigan before Fort Wayne. The censuses of 1910 and 1920 enumerate him as a photographer in the city, and the directories list his studio at 1008 Calhoun from 1912 to 1920. He moved away in 1939 and died at Elkhart; his death notice ran in the Journal Gazette on 20 November 1941. His obituary called his studio the "Cute Studio." The directories give that name to a different man's business at the same address: J. V. Shea opened the Cute Studio at 1008 Calhoun in October 1904, selling small photographs, buttons, and stamps, and advertising in June 1905 that it would make twenty-eight images in four poses for twenty-five cents — "Every picture a good one. Ugly people made good-looking. Bring your friends and don't forget the baby." Shea offered the studio for sale that August, and a notice of July 1919 moved "the Cute Studio" to 826 Calhoun under its new name, the Erwin Studio. Whether Blake's studio inherited the name informally, or the obituary writer compressed the address's history into one line, the record does not say; it stands here as the record gives it, unresolved.

One question this entry is often asked to answer, it cannot. Beatty's directory records no one's race, and no source reached for this section — not the Genealogical Society's biographical pages, not the Indiana Album's photographer records, not the press record — identifies any Fort Wayne studio photographer of the directory era as a Black photographer. Blake's is the name sometimes pointed to, but pointing is all the record does: it gives a Missouri-born photographer, his addresses, his years, and his children, and no more. He is printed here as documented, without the label the record does not give him. The deeper file on the question, if it exists, lies in the African/African-American Historical Society Museum's collections, whose institution is recorded in this history's Museums section.

Sources:

1. John D. Beatty, Directory of Fort Wayne Photographers 1843–1930 — entries for Washington Blake, J. V. Shea, the Cute Studio, and Frank D. Erwin, citing Fort Wayne city directories, 1910–1919, the federal censuses of 1910 and 1920, the Journal Gazette, 20 November 1941, and the Fort Wayne Sentinel, 15 October 1904, 8 June 1905, 22 August 1905, and 14 July 1919.