Photography’s Beginnings Web Contest #1 results

Photography’s Beginnings Web Contest #1 results contest.01.html

Announcing a Winning Entry in the

PHOTOGRAPHY’S BEGINNINGS

WEB CONTEST
This fascinating cabinet card, probably taken in the 1890s, shows a large crowd of people around the scene of some sort of explosion. Judging from the amount of destruction, this must have been big news in Reading, Pennsylvania in its day. The question is–what happened?The web contest challenged entrants to identify this scene and provide documentary evidence (a photocopy of a newspaper clipping or local history).

And the Winner is….

Congratulations to CRAIG SCHNEIDER of
Reading, Pa. who correctly identified this scene as the Grimshaw Silk Mill Disaster of January 9, 1889

17 people were killed when a cyclone struck the Silk Mill. 113 others were injured, many seriously. The Reading Eagle, in a special edition the next day, reported:

The storm first struck the large 1-story brick paint shop of the P & R Co. on the western side…From there, the cyclone twisted and twirled a path probably 100 yards wide across towards 9th street. A number of houses were unroofed, door steps where hurled into the streets like chimneys and window shutters were blown down, and finally the silk mill, was struck with tremendous force and the large building collapsed instantly and sunk into one mass of ruins. At least 275 operatives, principally girls, went down with the wreck, and above and about them were loose timbers, girders, glass, beams, and bricks and mortar, in terrible confusion, and all in the brief space ofabout two minutes.
It was a sudden, awful and most unexpected calamity.


Twelve of the 17 dead were teenaged girls. The disaster was so memorable that survivors held reunions into the 1930s.

THE PRIZE:
A hardbound copy of PHOTOGRAPHY’S BEGINNINGS: A VISUAL HISTORY. Now out of print, the original price of this volume was $45. Noted photographic historian Dr. Naomi Rosenblum called this book “a visual delight,” and wrote:
Handsomely designed and elegantly printed on heavy stock by a multi-tone process,
this publication reproduces a seductive array of daguerreotypes, calotypes,
ambrotypes, tintypes, albumen prints and platinum prints, mainly
from the nineteenth century.

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contest concluded August 1996