National Photo Company

The National Photo Company ran a commercial photographic service in Washington from about 1909 to 1932, and its beat was the capital city as a working place rather than as a monument.

The business model was subscription. Newspapers and magazines paid a fee and received a steady supply of pictures from Washington, which most of them could not afford to cover themselves. That meant the company photographed whatever might sell — which turned out to be almost everything.

So the file is not what you would expect from a government town. There are presidents and senators, certainly. But there are also fire drills, dog shows, radio demonstrations, department store windows, schoolchildren, road construction, aviators, beauty contests, boxing matches, women learning to drive, and an extraordinary number of people standing next to new machinery looking pleased about it.

Herbert French, who ran the company for most of its life, was a working photographer rather than a proprietor, and he shot a great deal of this himself. The house style shows it — a preference for standing back far enough to include the street, the weather and the bystanders, when a tighter frame would have sold just as well. It is the reason so many of these pictures are useful for things nobody intended to record.

The dates on the file are precise in a way most collections are not. National Photo stamped and numbered its negatives as a matter of business practice, so a caption reading 3/27/15 means March 27, 1915, and it is generally right. For a researcher that is worth a great deal.

The years covered are the ones in which Washington became a modern city. The collection opens with horses in the streets and closes with automobile traffic. It spans the First World War, the influenza epidemic, prohibition, women getting the vote, the arrival of commercial radio and the first stirrings of the Depression, all photographed at street level by people who were not trying to make history.

The Herbert French negatives are the core of it. French ran the company through most of its life, and roughly thirty thousand of the glass negatives came to the Library of Congress from his estate. Many were never printed at the time — they were shot, filed, and never sold, which means a substantial share of this collection was effectively unseen until the Library digitized it.

The women in this collection deserve a note. National Photo covered Washington through the years when women entered the federal workforce in numbers, and the file is full of them — clerks at desks, telephone operators at switchboards, government typists in rooms of forty. Nobody was making a point about it. They photographed the office because the office was there.

Two things are worth watching for. The company photographed the same events the wire services did, so some images circulate under other names. And a great many pictures are of people whose only claim on the record is that they were in Washington on a day when a photographer was working, which is precisely what makes them interesting a century later.

The Firm That Sold America Its Own Scenery