Harris & Ewing

• 1. Introduction

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  Harris & Ewing was a photographic studio in Washington, D.C. that spent decades building the visual record of American power. In 1908, a man named William Howard Taft stood at a telephone, receiving word that his party had chosen him as their presidential nominee. A photographer was there to capture the moment. That series of candid shots, titled The Anatomy of a Smile, made Harris & Ewing famous. What followed over the next seven decades was a story of one studio becoming the largest of its kind in the entire United States, accumulating a collection so vast it would eventually fill a wing of the Library of Congress. Who was behind the camera? Who kept the lights on? And what happened to nearly a million photographs when the studio finally closed?

• 2. A Flood and a Tip

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  George W. Harris got his start covering the Johnstown flood of 1889 in Pennsylvania. That disaster gave him his first experience as a news photographer, and the work shaped the rest of his career. He went on to work at Hearst News Service in San Francisco from 1900 to 1903. His break into the Washington world came when he joined President Theodore Roosevelt's press entourage on a train trip. The exact account varies, but either Roosevelt himself or a San Francisco newspaper editor was furious at having no photograph of George Frisbie Hoar to run alongside the story of Hoar's death. Someone told Harris: go open a studio in Washington. Harris listened. In 1905, he and Martha Ewing opened their doors at 1313 F Street NW, a specific address that would become one of the most photographed addresses in the capital's professional life.

• 3. The Woman Who Financed It

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  Martha Ewing was an artist and colorist, and Harris had worked with her before either of them arrived in Washington. She put up the money that made the studio possible and then ran the day-to-day operations. Her social connections proved especially valuable, drawing the kind of clientele a new studio needed to establish itself among Washington's political class. Harris bought out her share of the company in 1915, but Ewing did not simply walk away. She kept assisting the studio, particularly through the network of relationships she had cultivated. Her name remained on the building and on the business. The original 1905 building at 1313 F Street NW was eventually replaced with a purpose-built Harris & Ewing Photographic Studio building in 1924, a sign of how far the enterprise had grown since those first years.

• 4. Peak of an Industry

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  By the late 1930s, Harris & Ewing had grown into the largest photographic studio in the United States. At its peak, the operation ran five studios, employed 120 people, and maintained a news photo service that worked alongside large numbers of freelance photographers, much like the rival firm Underwood & Underwood. Government figures came in for formal portraits, the type of image for which the studio became particularly well known. But the firm was never limited to stiff official photographs. Many performers also sat for portraits there. The news service captured events as they unfolded across the capital. In 1945, that news service was sold off, a sign that the industry around photographic news distribution was changing. Harris himself remained the primary photographer until his retirement in 1955.

• 5. 700,000 Negatives

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  When George W. Harris retired in 1955, he did not simply walk away from the archive he had spent fifty years building. He gave roughly 700,000 glass and film negatives to the Library of Congress. That collection, now preserved as the Harris & Ewing Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division, covers people, events, and architecture photographed largely in and around Washington between 1905 and 1945. Many of those images have since been scanned and made available online. Other Harris & Ewing photographs are held by the City Museum of Washington, D.C., the National Portrait Gallery, and the Newseum. Harris died in 1964 at the age of 92, more than a decade after stepping back from the studio. Harris & Ewing itself kept operating until 1977, when it finally closed. The Professional Photographers of America named its highest award after Harris, the man who had first picked up a camera at a Pennsylvania flood site in 1889.