Historical Portrait
Portrait photograph of Arnold Genthe
Archive record
1 negative : glass ; 5 x 7 in. or smaller.
About this photograph
A glass negative portrait from 1896, the year Arnold Genthe opened his San Francisco studio. The photographer appears here as his own subject.
Genthe worked in the soft-focus pictorialist style and maintained the San Francisco studio until 1911, when he relocated to New York and continued photographing into the 1940s. After his death in 1942, the Library of Congress acquired roughly 20,000 items from his unclaimed studio.
The collection includes several thousand studio portraits alongside over 400 images of San Francisco's Chinatown, hundreds of dance photographs, and around 500 autochromes. This self-portrait dates to the beginning of that long career, made during Genthe's first year of studio practice in San Francisco.
Compiled from the catalogue record and reference notes on the formats and events involved. The archive record above is the primary source.
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