Where the pictures live

The archive layer

What survived, and where it sits: Fort Wayne's photographic memory is held principally by two institutions, both treated at length elsewhere in this history — the History Center in the Museums section, and the Allen County Public Library in the Sources section — and pointed to here rather than retold. The History Center holds Felix Schanz's glass plates and Elisha Poston's rooftop views of 1878–79, Paul Watters's Crown Graphic, and the DeLobbe family's donated materials; its photograph holdings form part of the collection counted in the Museums section, and it has exhibited the trade itself, in a temporary display recorded as "Stand Still! Early Cameras & Photography of Fort Wayne." The Allen County Public Library's Genealogy Center published Beatty's Directory, the Story of Fort Wayne section of this section; its digital collections hold the Daniel A. Baker Photograph Collection, the Harter Postcard Collection, and more than 120 photographs of the 1913 flood. (The library's Lincoln Collection holds some 5,000 nineteenth-century photographs, but those are Lincoln material gathered from everywhere, not Fort Wayne makers' work, and the two are not to be conflated.)

Beyond the two houses: the Indiana Album, Joan Hostetler's statewide Indiana Photographers Project, carries more than 600 images tagged to Allen County and Fort Wayne and a working database of the state's photographers — WICR's Hoosier History Live devoted its program of 10 October 2020 to Fort Wayne's historic photographers and studios; the Indiana Historical Society's digital collections hold the interior photograph of Charles Miner's studio; Purdue Fort Wayne's digital collections carry the theatre programs that credit Gabriel DeLobbe; and the University of Pennsylvania's Architectural Archives hold DeLobbe's Kahn photographs, the one body of a Fort Wayne maker's work filed out of state. The losses state themselves against the survivals: of the hundred-odd studios Beatty lists between 1843 and 1930, the directory names two bodies of a studio's own work as surviving into an archive — Schanz's glass plates and Poston's views. The rest of the trade survives as it was sold: one portrait at a time, in family hands.

Sources:

1. John D. Beatty, Directory of Fort Wayne Photographers 1843–1930 — the History Center survivals noted at the entries for Felix Schanz and Elisha W. Poston; Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, Allen County photographs page — the History Center's "Stand Still!" exhibition and the 1913 flood photograph holdings.
2. The Indiana Album (Indiana Photographers Project) — Allen County/Fort Wayne tagged images; WICR, Hoosier History Live, 10 October 2020, "Historic Fort Wayne photographers and studios"; Indiana Historical Society, Digital Image Collections; University of Pennsylvania, Architectural Archives.
3. Cross-references within this history: Museums (the History Center), Sources (the Allen County Public Library and the archive institutions), Historic Maps (the map record).