Frederick Monsen

At the turn of the last century, Frederick I. Monsen (1865-1929) made a successful career as a photographer and lecturer on American Indian subjects. The Norwegian-born Monsen, who was brought to Utah as a three-year old child, was assisting his photographer father by his teens. After working as a free-lance photographer and serving with several governmental surveys, he began to give public lectures in 1893. He first traveled among Indian tribes of the Southwest in 1894-95. Unlike most professional photographers of the time, Monsen preferred Kodak flexible film, along with a smaller, 4 x 5 inch negative. Around 1900, he established a San Francisco studio, with one of the biggest enlargers on the west coast. Like Watkins, Monsen lost most of his life's work in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, but he was able to reconstruct much of it by making copies from existing prints. Turning almost exclusively to lecturing, he spent the rest of his life living in New York City and Pasadena, and continuing his travels in the Southwest. Employing a derivative style, Monsen's images were picturesque and romanticized. These are two of four pictures donated in 1917 by Monsen himself.