The camera club and the pictorialist: Paul B. Miller's seven salons

1949 — the South Bend Camera Club in the record

The amateur standing: Alongside the trade stood the amateurs, and South Bend's are documented at the size of a single rich caption. In the final issue of the 1948–49 year, the Notre Dame Scholastic's "Picture of the Week" printed a photograph of the interior of Sacred Heart Church — the Rev. Edward Keller, C.S.C., kneeling at the altar — and captioned it whole: the picture was taken by "Paul B. Miller of South Bend (member of South Bend Camera Club, Photographic Society of America, Royal Photographic Society of England, and Professional Photographers Association). This picture has been accepted for exhibition at seven national and international Salons of Photography." One caption therefore establishes three things at once: that the South Bend Camera Club existed and was active in 1949; that a South Bend pictorialist held membership in the national and the English royal photographic societies; and that his work had passed the juries of seven salons — the exhibition circuit by which serious amateur photography measured itself in that era. Erich Bruegmann of Niles, whose 2019 obituary names his club membership, confirms the club drew from the whole Michiana area. The club's founding date was not established in the records reached, and no club archive was located; its institutional life belongs also to the Private Clubs file, and it stands here at the size the caption gives it. The same Scholastic year shows the student side of the craft: James Ferstel was the magazine's photography editor in 1948–49, with a cover photograph credited to him — the campus press training its own, a year before the university's official photographic record-keeping, described below, was already under way.

Sources:

1. Notre Dame Scholastic, "Picture of the Week," final issue of the 1948–49 academic year (June 1949) — the Sacred Heart Church photograph and its caption, quoted verbatim: Paul B. Miller of South Bend; the four memberships; "accepted for exhibition at seven national and international Salons of Photography"; the issue's staff box names James Ferstel as photography editor.
2. Obituary of Erich Bruegmann of Niles (2019) — his South Bend Camera Club membership.