In 1893, in the Jamaica Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Chicago, a group of photographs was unveiled for the first time. They were the photographs of Valentine & Sons of Dundee, Scotland. The photographs were commissioned by a group of Jamaican businessmen calling themselves the “Awakening Jamaica” committee, who thought an exhibition of photographs would be the cure for a slugging economy.
Valentine & Sons, which began as a lithographic printing company and went on to become a leading manufacturer of picture postcards, was an internationally photography studio as well. One of the original sons, James, had become an early pioneer of photography, while another, George, moved to New Zealand to become a landscape photographer. The family’s love of photography made them naturals to create a series of photographs designed to show Jamaica as paradise for the businessman and the tourist alike.
Photo: Kingston From Harbor, Courtesy of HistoryMiami
From the series, 116 large format photographs were displayed to great acclaim at the World’s Fair, and featured in the book World’s Fair, Jamaica at Chicago as An Account Descriptive of the Colony of Jamaica. The exhibition was a tremendous success, but the photographs did not fare as well. They were mostly forgotten soon thereafter, and the negatives were destroyed in 1961.
Photo archivist Patrick Montgomery of The Caribbean Photo Archive has been tracking down and acquiring original prints of the 1891 photographs over the course of the last ten years. The prints will be displayed together for the first time since the Chicago fair in “Awakening Jamaica: Photographs by Valentine & Sons, 1891” on view at HistoryMiami through November 1, 2015.
More than fifty original prints and additional items from Montgomery’s private collection will be on view, providing a look at Jamaica at the turn of the twentieth century. Through the lens of Valentine & Sons, we are shown a timeless idyll, a verdant island of mountains, valleys, and streams, a landscape that suggests nothing so much as heaven on earth.
Photo: Kingston East End, Courtesy of HistoryMiami
“Awakening Jamaica” brings us back to a time and a place where photography was new, and its impact was just beginning to take hold on shaping the bourgeois mind in the ways of art, culture, and influence. With the benefit of more than a century past, we can regard the works of Valentine & Sons as both art and artifact, articulating the spaces in which business, technology, and media overlap—while also being shocking reminders of the transience of modern living.
As Patrick Montgomery explains, “Original prints such as these, made directly from large glass negatives for the tourist market, were soon after displaced by amateur snapshots and postcards, and became obsolete relics banished to attics.”
Photo: Ferry on Rio Cobre, Courtesy of HistoryMiami
It is difficult to think of large format photographs as anything other than fine art, but it appears that once upon a time they too were just the latest technological advancements in an increasingly literate age, when the creation and consumption of media was used to spur business forward. The photographs of Valentine & Sons were a form of international marketing, in its earliest forms, when the format was still luxurious and able to command the wall. It is a blessing the HistoryMiami will host the first exhibition of these photographs in more than a century.
Awakening Jamaica: Photographs by Valentine & Sons, 1891 is on view at HistoryMiami now through November 1, 2015.
Header: Kingston From Harbor, Courtesy of HistoryMiami
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
