J. S. Wooley

In 1880, Jesse Sumner Wooley, an energetic and entrepreneurial thirteen-year-old farm boy from Saratoga County, took a job as an errand boy for a pair of town photographers. This summer job led to a career that would define Wooley's life. From that early start, Wooley went on to become a prominent businessman and inventive photographer in Upstate New York. This volume tells the fascinating story of Wooley's rise from his impoverished rural roots to a position of success and prosperity as an artist who illuminated twentieth-century bourgeois American culture through his photography. Including more than one hundred color and duotone photographs from his corpus, including a gallery of images from Matt Finley's private collection, the book reveals the range of Wooley's work: Adirondack panoramas, architectural studies, travel shows depicting the American west and Europe, and documentary photographs of contemporary events. Wooley's career is situated within the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century town photography, a field dominated by male commercial photographers who captured the day-to-day events of rural and town life. Like many of these professional photographers