The electronic publication of five thousand views from the Pomona Public Library’s Burton Frasher Collection makes a fascinating picture archive available for research, armchair travel, and intensive visual analysis of a dynamic period in the history of modern California and the West. These five thousand photographs are less than ten percent of the entire inventory of Frasher photographs that were made for sale, chiefly as postcards, and are now part of the Pomona Public Library’s research materials. A team of consultants worked with the library staff to review the entire collection with the aim of providing the most interesting views as well as a representative sample of the topics and geographic breadth that made the Frasher Fotos trademark so well regarded in the first half of the twentieth century.

Burton Frasher (pronounced Frasier) was born in Aurora, Colorado in 1888 and died in 1955 in Pomona, California. Coming from a family of modest means, Frasher began working in his early teens as an itinerant crate maker who followed the fruit harvests from orchard to packinghouse. Even then, he carried a camera and made photographs in his spare time. His work brought him to the west coast where he made periodic excursions into the Sierra Nevada mountain range as he followed the harvest from California to Washington. By World War I, he decided that a small town stationary and photo business offered a more secure livelihood.

Even after settling in Pomona in 1920, the traveling life remained in Frasher’s blood. He seized every opportunity to motor about. An early photograph of Frasher shows him seated on a motorcycle with his young bride in a sidecar. After the birth of their son, Burton Jr., the couple switched to a covered car which offered more protection as they roamed further afield, frequently off road.

Burton Frasher was born the same year that George Eastman coined the word “Kodak” for his new mass market cameras. In contrast with amateur photographers, Frasher never cut technical corners by using elementary snapshot equipment. But “Kodak As You Go,” the early slogan promoting the amateur craze, was the guiding principle in Frasher’s life. His combined passion for automobile travel and photography also explains why Frasher’s postcards were so popular with the first generation of motoring tourists in California.

The postcard side of his Pomona-based business evolved during the 1920s. His love of fishing continued to beckon him on camping trips to the Sierra where he became familiar with many of the hotels. It was on one of these trips that a hotel proprietor first asked Frasher for photographs printed in postcard format. His postcard business quickly expanded to include Southern California and the Eastern Sierra.

Between 1920 and 1940, Frasher Fotos closely paralleled the rise of motor culture within the western United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tourist travel was accomplished by rail and guided excursions, but by the mid-1920s automobiles became the preferred means of transportation. Frasher was an enthusiastic advocate of car travel. He enjoyed the freedom that the automobile offered for exploring the mountain and desert regions of California that were becoming increasingly accessible from his residence in the Pomona Valley.

Frasher first concentrated on the destinations and activities specific to summer travel. But he soon expanded his repertoire to include the early activities of winter sports enthusiasts in the San Bernardino mountains. Already in the early 1920s, a coalition of resort owners scattered between Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear lobbied for improved roads and snow removal equipment to bring Southern California residents and tourists into the mountains during the winter season. Frasher documented the developing road system as well as the heavy machinery employed to reduce the hazards of winter travel. His postcards sought to balance the thrill of adventure with reassurance that modern conveniences were never far away (F4080; 7195)

The First Annual Midwinter Carnival was held in Lake Arrowhead in 1927 followed by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce’s extensive campaign to promote winter sports in Southern California. By the late 1930s, Frasher’s winter scenes included the emerging ski industry in the Eastern Sierra. It is hard to imagine that avid skiers from Southern California would drive hours on dirt roads just to ride the rope tow part way to the top of a wide mountain slope, but the Frasher inventory documents Dave McCoy’s pioneering ski lift just south of Mammoth Lakes on Highway 395. (F6)

Viewers of this collection can study the early paved roads of the 1920s that evolved into a national interstate highway system. Frasher provided custom views to a network of restaurants, gas stations, and motor lodges springing up along these arterial routes. His photographs of these roadside enterprises are the most extensive documentation of the emerging car culture in the West. The wealth of detail recorded in Frasher’s postcards invites the modern viewer to study the tastes and desires of the early automobile tourist and business traveler. Future anthropologists may use this material to speculate about the transitional habits of this recent nomadic tribe. Surely, cultural historians will have a field day with the abundance of joke cards featuring Western outhouses (F813; J20). Likewise, a host of theories may be developed about Frasher’s all time bestseller, a portrait of a burro captioned “A Native Son of the Desert,” with sales reportedly exceeding three million copies. (A133).

Frasher looked closely at the developing urban landscape of the American West with a particular concentration on the cities of Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Frasher’s photographs detail the automobile’s profound impact on the architecture of these two cities. His extensive archive of night photographs in Las Vegas (F8945) and Los Angeles (B7275) explores an urban world designed for observation and navigation from behind the wheel of a slow moving motor vehicle.

According to western historian Russ Leadabrand, H.W. Eichbaum opened Death Valley to the motoring public after completing his toll road in 1927. But it was Burton Frasher who introduced Eichbaum to Death Valley with his pictures. The photographers most famously associated with Death Valley are Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. However, Frasher preceded both of these luminaries by two decades. Adams once wrote, “To photographers, Death Valley is full of riddles and illusions. Its unearthly beauty is exceedingly difficult to photograph.” Only the most motivated photographer could endure the blowing sand, high winds, and inhuman temperatures of this locale. Frasher reveled in Death Valley’s challenges, returning again and again over his long career. The great modernist photographer Edward Weston became captivated by the stark beauty and otherworldly nature of this desert landscape when he first traveled there on a Guggenheim fellowship in 1937. Whereas Weston treated the landscape as a canvas for formal artistic exploration, Frasher sought to capture the scenic wonders of Death Valley. He included the distant vista, the trail of footsteps, and the occasional human being, all devices to keep monumentality in scale. In contrast, Weston focused on geologic forms and the textures of sand and sky, creating abstract compositions in which distances are utterly ambiguous. It is a measure of their separate achievements that the 1939 Works Project Administration’s Death Valley: A Guide reproduces images by both photographers. Since their photographs appeared under one cover, quite possibly Weston’s famous dune series inspired Frasher’s later pictures of Death Valley, which were more abstract while still containing signs of human presence. (B2621)

Frasher doubtless knew the photography of Ansel Adams. As the brightest star in the firmament of Yosemite photographers for the better part of the twentieth century, Adams set the aesthetic standard for a legion of followers. “Clearing Winter Storm,” Adams’s powerful image of snow-dusted Yosemite Valley partially enshrouded by clouds, has become an iconic image of an iconic place. For the artistically minded tourist, Frasher offered a similarly atmospheric view with his postcard, “After the Storm.” (F7727) As with Adams’s picture, this brooding scene provides not the least hint that it was taken from a parking lot. But unlike Adams who always excluded such banalities, Frasher often showed nature’s expanse punctuated by the cars, trails and markers of a tourist reality.

In his depictions of Native Americans, Frasher parted company with many of his photographic colleagues. Frasher traveled throughout the Southwest taking pictures of the Indian trades people who supplied tourists with jewelry and other crafts. Generations of photographers denied these tribal artists – many of them women –full identities, captioning their pictures with generic titles like “Weaver” or “Pottery Maker.” Frasher broke with this long tradition of anonymity and gave names to faces. Thus one finds, for example, an image of Mrs. Johnson sitting amidst her beautiful pots at Acoma Pueblo, or Alfredo Herrera stamping jewelry at his worktable in the Cochiti Pueblo (A9586; A9492). This collection provides new material for future studies of southwest Native Americans and their own adaptations to modern tourist economies.

Most commercially produced postcards are printed on a press in large volume. The resulting pictures are often striking from afar, but less so on close inspection where there is more dot pattern than fine detail. Frasher Fotos preferred the clarity of cards printed photographically and in small lots. As a result, the tonal quality and level of informational detail far surpasses ordinary postcards. This comparatively small-scale operation permitted both clients and the Frasher Fotos traveling salesmen (who also doubled as company photographers) to experiment with a wider repertoire of views in each locale since an image printed photographically could be test marketed in small numbers. The result is a vast and remarkably diverse compilation of images containing a wealth of visual information. The long-term legacy of Frasher Fotos is a varied yet systematic collection of imagery for future students of the modern American West.

This essay was written for the Frasher Foto Postcard Digitization project by Project consultants

- Michael Dawson (Owner of Dawson's Books, Los Angeles, California);

- Sally Stein (Professor of Art History, University of California at Irvine);

- Jennifer Watts (Curator of Photographs, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California).

November 2003