Walter R. Latimer, Sr.

About the Artist

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  Paul L. Anderson. Walter R. Latimer, Sr. 1915. Collection Center for Creative Photography. Gift of Mrs. Frank H. Icaza

  Walter R. Latimer was born in High Bridge, New Jersey, in 1880, the son of a tinsmith. Trained as an engineer, he worked for the Taylor-Wharton Iron and Steel Company and served as the town tax collector. In 1914 he left High Bridge to study at the newly founded Clarence H. White School of Photography, in New York. There he met his future wife, Blanche Hungerford, who had attended Clarence H. White’s class at Columbia Teachers College in 1913 and was also studying at the White School.

  There is a cache of approximately ninety-five photographs by Hungerford and Latimer at the Maryland Historical Society. Most of the photographs are by Hungerford, who seems to have been inspired by the modernist, soft-focus photographs of New York by a fellow White School student, cinematographer Karl Struss. Pictures by Latimer include several portraits of “Miss H,” which rely on romantic, Pictorialist conventions and charmingly document the couple’s courtship, along with a print of Concourse, Jersey City Station (MoMA 1756.2001) and a Japanesque still life, Bunch of Color, made through the experimental and ultimately unsuccessful Hess-Ives color process, pioneered by Struss. There is also a remarkable view of the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge—an enlarged Platinum print—titled Metallic Lace.

  Because there are no extant photographs by Latimer or Hungerford after 1918, it appears that they gave up photography when they started a family. Their interest in the White School, however, continued. Latimer was the first president of the alumni association, which played an important part in financing the school. Both Latimer and Hungerford were represented in the Pictorial Photographers of America’s first annual exhibition, in 1920—Hungerford with a 1915 New York street scene and Latimer with a landscape of unknown date.

  Latimer died of “abscesses of the stomach” in 1924. The family’s devotion to the White School seems to have inspired their son to attend the school in the 1930s. The school’s archive in the Princeton University Art Museum contains two prints by Walt Latimer, who donated works by his parents to the Maryland Historical Society in 1976.

  —Bonnie Yochelson

• Alternate Name(s) Walter Roland Latimer (Birth Name)
  

Meeting Points

• Cultural Hubs New York
  
• Schools White School, 1914–42
  

Artist Chronology

Walther Photographs

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  Concourse, Jersey City Station

Related Essays

• 
  Yochelson, Bonnie
  The Clarence H. White School of Photography