E. G. Barnhill

In the age of railroads and steamships, of frontier Florida and the tourism boom of the early 1900s, photographer E. G. Barnhill set up shop in the young city of St. Petersburg. He pioneered a popular new type of tourist art, colorizing black-and-white snapshots taken by himself and his customers. He sold many of his hand-colored photographs as postcards or home décor.

Barnhill applied watercolors to black-and-white prints according to his own sense of light and palette and his interpretation of consumer demand. Visitors wanted one-of-a-kind works of art to help them remember the experience of Florida. Unlike other colorists of the time whose landscapes were airbrushed to appear dreamy and ethereal, Barnhill captured the state’s clear, brisk colors with richness and intensity. He pushed aside conventions by using matte instead of glossy print paper to soak up colors better, and with radical experiments in gold toning and uranium dyes, which created unearthly hues.

Filled with vibrant images of Barnhill’s unique creations, precursors to the popular landscape art of the Highwaymen and others, this book showcases a little-known artist whose inventive techniques—particularly his uranium-dye coloring—merit a place in the story of American photography. A fascinating mix of photographic realism and individual artistic vision, his work reveals both the Florida that was and the Florida that tourists wanted to believe in.