Photography genius: George R Lawrence & "The hitherto impossible

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2002 by Petterchak, Janice

In New York, where flashlight pictures were banned in public places because of the fire hazard, financier J. P. Morgan, Sr. invited Lawrence to demonstrate the "absolute safety" of his method by photographing a large banquet group. The success of his smoke-collecting bags brought an immediate removal of the flashlight prohibition.

In Chicago, officials opposed Lawrence's plan to make a flashlight photograph of a banquet honoring President William McKinley "for fear the place might be wrecked." Lawrence demonstrated to the authorities the safety of his methods, then secured a picture of the event that became one of his most famous images.9

Another of Lawrence's well-known banquet photographs, titled "Secretary Taft's Philippine Party Dinner," was probably taken at the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago on April 9, 1904. Governor of the Philippines William Howard Taft had just returned to begin new duties as Secretary of War for President Theodore Roosevelt." Lawrence was commercially successful using the camera at festivals and other events, as well as photographing factories and neighborhood scenes.

"The Big Camera"

Lawrence's success with panoramic cameras led officials of the Chicago and Alton Railroad to request a single-plate photograph of its new Chicago-to-St. Louis passenger train, the "Alton Limited." To that time, according to a company writer, no railway train in the world had ever presented a design so uniform and symmetrical. No train of cars had ever before been built with windows of the same size, shape, and style from mail car to parlor car; the cars in no train heretofore had all been mounted on standard six-wheel trucks; no former effort had been made to have every car in the train precisely the same length and height; and no railway, except the Alton Road, had ever caused the tender of its locomotives to be constructed to rise to the exact height of the body of the cars following; the hood of its locomotives to the exact height of the roofs of the cars. This gave a fascinating beauty to the train-carrying out of the principal features with classic regularity-the absolute unity of detail from cow-catcher to observation platform. Indeed this was what created, and impelled, the idea to obtain a photograph of the "Limited" sufficiently large to readily impress the public with the train's unprecedented symmetry.11

Lawrence, who had previously photographed some of the railroad line's standard passenger locomotives, "was called into conference" on this project. With existing cameras, he explained, he could make only a series of sectional views and piece them together. Company officials, however, "had built a faultless train of which they demanded a faultless photograph, insisting that in length the picture must not measure less than eight feet."12

Accepting the challenge, Lawrence sought the assistance of local inventor J. A. Anderson. Within eight months they designed and built the "Big Camera," a massive contraption weighed 1,400 pounds and requiring fifteen operators. The bellows extended twenty feet on steel-track wheels. The lenses were reported as the largest ever ground for photographic work-the telescopic rectilinear lens being 11 feet equivalent focus. The 10'x6' plate-holder created 8'x4 1/2' pictures-three times the print size of existing panoramic cameras.13