C.C. Curtis

Charles Clifford Curtis (1862–1956) was a pioneering American photographer who is best remembered for his documentary photography of the logging industry in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the late 19th century. His photographs, which captured the felling of the famous Mark Twain Tree and the General Noble tree, helped to convince the public that these giant sequoias were not a hoax. Curtis was well known for his use of large plate photography, which allowed him to capture portraits of people and gatherings that were dwarfed by the scale of the giant trees. His images of logging crews working in the rugged terrain of Converse Basin are considered some of the most iconic and enduring images of the era.

Early life C.C. Curtis was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, on May 28, 1862. He moved to California at the age of 19 and began his photography career as an apprentice in San Francisco. He quickly developed a passion for the craft and began traveling throughout the San Joaquin Valley with his bulky and heavy glass plate photography equipment, using a donkey as his mode of transportation. He traveled to the fair with plans to sell prints of the images he had taken of the process. However, upon arriving at the fair with fifty-thousand prints to sell, he was denied a vendor booth and was unable to recoup his significant investment. As a result, he returned home financially ruined.

Later life In early 1891, a group of former members of the Kaweah Colony, including Curtis, established another utopian experiment called the Esperanza Land Improvement Company in an area called Esperanza on the Kettleman Plains, located to the west of the Traver and Hanford area. After returning from the World's Fair in 1892, Curtis and his family lived on their property in Esperanza as wheat farmers and scaled down his photography business. They struggled financially during the depression of 1882–1885.

Eventually, Curtis moved to San Jose, California to work in a spice mill and later to San Francisco to work at the Folgers Coffee Company. He helped to save the Folgers factory during a fire caused by the 1906 earthquake. He eventually settled in Pasadena, where he lived until 1932 and worked as a produce buyer. In 1932, he and his wife Maria retired to Cottage Grove, Oregon. Maria died that year at the age of 68 after 48 years of marriage. Curtis remarried twice before dying at the age of 93 in 1956.

Throughout his life, Curtis kept his glass plate negatives, which were later rescued and saved by his grandson, Charles Curtis Annand. Today, many of Curtis's prints are part of the collections of UCLA, the National Park Service, and the Library of Congress.

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