Darius Kinsey Bio
Born in Maryville, Missouri on July 23, 1869, Darius Kinsey was raised in Missouri and Kansas until migrating west to Snoqualmie, Washington in 1889. He was almost immediately drawn to the discipline of photography, buying his first camera the following year. While working as an itinerant photographer throughout the region, he met Tabitha Pritts. They were married in 1896 and together built a combination home and studio in Sedro-Woolley, Washington. Darius would make portraits and photograph the surrounding landscape; Tabitha would develop prints in the darkroom.
By 1906, they had moved to Seattle, Washington, where Kinsey gave up studio portraiture to photograph the massive logging operations in the Northwestern United States. The Kinseys sold the pictures to loggers for an average of a dollar each. They made at least 4,500 such negatives, originally on glass plates; in 1914, they switched to film. By the 1920s, Kinsey primarily shot with an 11x14 Eastman View camera, capturing all stages of the logging industry in the highest fidelity available at the time.
Their business continued until 1940, when Darius suffered a career-ending injury after falling from a tree stump. He continued to work, sorting and organizing his negatives, until his death in 1945. Most of his archive is held in the Whatcom Museum collection in Bellingham, Washington, whose scans of negatives were used in this exhibition and catalog.
Darius Kinsey: Clear Cut credits / clip from Darius Kinsey: Clear Cut
