Charles C. Pierce

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Charles C. Pierce (born November 22, 1861 in Springfield, Massachusetts ; died November 7, 1946 in Los Angeles, California) was an American photographer who ran a photo agency. He is one of the first (landscape) photographers in the Los Angeles, California area.

Life

By training as an engineer, Charles C. Pierce moved from Chicago to Southern California for health reasons in 1886 and began his photography career in Los Angeles. Around 1900 he founded his own photo studio in Los Angeles at 313 Spring Street. In the course of his career, Charles C. Pierce moved several times and finally expanded his photo studio to include another line of business, namely the trade in photo accessories. Pierce put together a collection of more than ten thousand photos, which was very large for the time, but which consisted not only of his own work, but also of negatives and photo prints that he bought from other local photographers. These included images by Emil Ellis, Parker and Knight, Ramsey, Herve Friend, LM Clendenon, George P. Thresher, George Wharton James and FM Huddleston.

Pierce made their names or trademarks unrecognizable on the photographs he bought and instead stamped his own name on the back of the pictures. Most of the photographs in his collection can therefore no longer be assigned to their actual authors, and only some of the photographs published under his name actually come from Pierce.

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Charles C. Pierce arranged his photo collection thematically according to image content. He offered his photo archive under the name "CC Pierce Collection of Rare, Historical and Curious Photographs, Illustrating California, the Pacific Coast and the Southwest" (for example, as the "CC Pierce Collection of rare, historical and strange photographs, which California, show the Pacific coast and the southwest). "

Together with other photographers - initially with Albert H. Lohn, later with JB Blanchard and AE McConnell - Charles C. Pierce began to document the landscape, the architecture and the inhabitants of Southern California photographically from 1886. His photo archive also contained numerous photos of Native Americans and objects that they had made (such as baskets). His collection also contains a number of photographs from Los Angeles, Riverside (California) and other Californian locations from the period between 1886 and 1946 - panoramas, cityscapes, street scenes, striking buildings and the like. Christian mission stations are another focus of his pictorial program. Pierce divided his image archive into the following categories:

  • Los Angeles Historical;
  • Indians (Native Americans);
  • Missions (Christian mission stations);
  • California cities, counties, etc. (California cities, counties, and the like);
  • Industries and Agriculture;
  • Transportation (transportation);
  • Natural history;
  • Art and Architecture and
  • Miscellaneous Scenery (various landscapes and other sceneries).

Within these main categories, Pierce created sub-categories such as "History", "Landscape", "People", "Urban and Social Events", "Built Environment" and "Development of Southern California and the American Southwest from about 1845 to about 1930".

After his death in 1946, his photo collection was distributed to several archives in the Los Angeles area, including the Title Insurance and Trust Company (Ticor) at the University of Southern California's Center for Regional History (USC Regional History Center); the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History and special collections at the University of California , Los Angeles (UCLA Special Collections). The University of California also acquired CC Pierce's photo trading books from 1909 to 1921 (Call # 170/134).

Photo collections with photographs by Charles C. Pierce

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Commons : Charles C. Pierce  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Pierce, Charles C.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photographer and operator of a photo agency
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Springfield, Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH November 7, 1946
Place of death Los Angeles (California)