Responding to the Autochromes of George Terziev by Katherine Greenleaf
Abstract:
George Terziev, my great-grandfather, was born in 1876 to an illiterate mother and impoverished father in Bansko, present-day Bulgaria, then part of the Ottoman Empire. He was the first of their children to survive to adulthood. He somewhat improbably managed to obtain a basic education at a missionary school in Samokov, emigrated to America, attended a state college, then Harvard (BA/MA), and was working toward a PhD in organic chemistry when he dropped out to move on with the rest of his life. George went on to have a long career as a research chemist for the Solvay Process in upstate New York; his main area, in which he held patents, was the soda ash process. George married an American woman with old roots in this country and had three children, whom he never taught his native language. He died in 1960.
George was a dedicated amateur photographer who shot over 60 autochromes still in my family's possession between about 1915 and 1935. George was not a man of leisure; he worked for a living, and his life and background push back against the narrative that shooting autochromes was a rarified experience reserved for the affluent or primarily enjoyed in camera clubs. While George was a dedicated member of the Men's Garden Club of America (and left a voluminous record in that regard), I have no evidence that he was ever part of any camera or photo club in Syracuse. Instead, the autochromes (and the many hundreds of plain black-and-white photos) that he shot in the teens, twenties, and thirties appear to have been shot for private enjoyment only and are best understood through the lenses of vernacular photography, assimilation, and identity formation.
The autochromes span the period in George's life when he married, had children, and watched those children grow up. While becoming a parent is a common impetus for engaging more in photography, George was working through the fallout of something specific: he had, at one point, hoped to return to his native Bulgaria, and when he couldn't do that, he had hoped to marry a woman from his home country. World events rendered both goals impossible, and so George had to decide if and how and how much he was going to assimilate.
The autochromes show him working through these questions in real time and reflect the complicated nature of his situation. Some of them show the Anglo-American fantasy of a cottage garden, while others show his extremely blonde children wearing traditional Bulgarian folk costumes. Paired with diary entries, letters, and some family financial documents, I will line up primary source documentation with specific images to show how I've tried to understand this man I never met, and how photography helped him understand who he was and who he could be.
Since I have George's equipment, including his camera, original autochrome filter, etc., and I have access to the places and clothing in some of his photographs, I will share some modern autochromes I have shot and processed myself with the help of Jon Hilty, who makes reproduction plates -- and I will line these up with autochromes George took (or, in a couple of cases, related autochromes taken by someone else). My own personal practice in this regard is about revisiting places, objects, and experiences. I will also show pictures I took inside of a darkroom while processing a reproduction plate to help people understand the process (which is very simple, it's just black and white reversal, but I think there are some people in the group who won't have seen this).
Biography
Katherine Greenleaf is a student in the MA in Photographic History at De Montfort University, who lives in Chicago, Illinois, USA. She has worked in the business end of photography since 2015, first at Central Camera, Chicago's oldest camera store, and since 2021 for Film Supply Club, which caters to professional photographers shooting on film. In addition, Katherine has worked freelance in the Audio Visual Services department at the Art Institute of Chicago since 2019, where she provides support for time-based media installations, including analogue works. High points of that role have included providing in-gallery projection of Andy Warhol's 16mm films and supporting an installation of Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, among other artworks. Katherine's interest in material photographic histories grew during her work at Central Camera, where she spent a lot of time at the photo finishing counter, and developed further during a short but impactful stint with the National Museum of African American History and Culture's Community Curation program in 2019, where she was part of a team that digitized 25,000 objects, mostly family photographs, in a month. In her current role at Film Supply Club, Katherine operates major, direct accounts with Kodak and other suppliers, and manages a membership program that supports more than 500 working photographers who make analog film a central part of their practice. This direct, first-hand view of how the analog ecosystem operates today helps support her research and thinking about the photographic networks of the past. Katherine is interested in twentieth-century color technology and methods of reproduction. She is a founding member of a new community darkroom in Chicago, called Safelight Analog Collective. Katherine is originally from Rochester, New York.
