The newly acquired Ernest Marquez Collection of photographs records Santa Monica’s transformation from rustic hamlet to international symbol of the California good life, with prints from the 1870s to the 1950s. In the mid-1870s, the Southern Pacific Railroad was on the brink of connecting upstart Los Angeles to the rest of the nation and the new township of Santa Monica welcomed city dwellers to its beachside tent cities. Photographers opened studios catering to the incipient tourist trade and recorded the birth of the city. The new collection includes images by some of the regions earliest photographers including William M. Godfrey, Francis Parker, Hayward & Muzzall and Carleton E. Watkins. The Marquez collection will be on-line soon at The Huntington but in the meantime L’oeil is pleased to offer a sneak peek at this marvelous new resource.
Jennifer A. Watts, curator of photographs at The Huntington sat down to answer some questions about the new acquisition.
Andy Romanoff: How did the Marquez collection come to The Huntington?
Jennifer A. Watts: I first met Ernest, Ernie to his friends, in 1997 when I was working on an exhibition on water in Los Angeles. I had first gone through our own collections, and then went to the Department of Water and Power and somewhere in the midst of that the archivist for the DWP said to me “You know there’s this man named Ernest Marquez who has an incredible collection of historic photographs – you need to go see him”. So I called him up and went out to his place in the Valley and was just completely overwhelmed by what I saw. He ended up loaning some things to the exhibition and that was the beginning of our friendship. Ernie is well known in regional history circles both as a collector and as someone who is very knowledgeable, so over the years I’ve gone to him with questions and occasionally he has come to me, so I knew about the collection but never ever thought we would be able to acquire it. I assumed it would probably go to auction. But in the summer of 2013 a representative came to me and said “Ernie feels very strongly that the collection should stay together, he feels it should belong to an institution where it will be used and preserved and he wants the Huntington to have first crack at it”, essentially a right of first refusal. At first I wasn’t sure we could afford it, but we cobbled together some funds and our collectors group helped underwrite part of it and that’s how it came to be.
A.R: How many photos are there in the collection?
J.W: We’re saying officially about 4600 images but I believe it’s going to end up being quite a bit bigger than that. He’s got other things that are slowly going to come, things like negative collections which we are in a good position to handle. We have a 900 square foot cold storage vault for negative storage, something not a lot of other places have and we have facilities to scan them and we already have a huge collection of negatives so I think it’s going to be closer to 8000 images when we’re done.
A.R: When will the public begin to see some of the collection?
J.W: We’re going to make some selections available right away on our digital library (hdl.huntington.org) and ultimately it will be integrated into our exhibition and publication program.
A.R: Does the fact that it comes in now with digital techniques readily available mean it might be seen more quickly?
J.W: I think there are a couple of things going on here. One is that the collection came in very well organized so it’s easier to commit to scanning it quickly. And then I feel that people are very excited by this acquisition so we have a better opportunity to raise the funds needed to catalog it and most of all, Ernie is still alive (he’s 90) and very intellectually agile and willing and able to help us get this done while he can still enjoy it.
Story and modern photos copyright Andy Romanoff, all rights reserved
Historical photos property of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
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