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African-Americans at a picnic, circa 1890, Bon Air, Chesterfield County (Photo via Cook Collection 1384 courtesy The Valentine)
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Hull Street, early 20th century, Manchester (Photo via Cook Collection courtesy The Valentine)
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Highland Park viewed from Highland Park School, early 20th century, East Brookland Park Boulevard and Second Avenue (Photo via Cook Collection courtesy The Valentine)
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Hotel Richmond rooftop restaurant, after 1904, Ninth and East Grace streets (Photo via Cook Collection 0684 courtesy The Valentine)
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War Bond Parade on Monument Avenue, 1917 (Photo via Cook Collection 1529 courtesy The Valentine)
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New York Restaurant, early 20th century, Main Street, Richmond (Photo via Cook Collection 1008 courtesy The Valentine)
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Valentine’s Meat Juice Co., early 20th century, Sixth and Cary streets, Richmond (Photo via Cook Collection 1019 courtesy The Valentine)
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Baseball team at St. Emma Industrial and Agricultural Institute, early 20th century, Powhatan County (Photo via Cook Collection 1672 courtesy The Valentine)
Louise Catterall, an early member of Richmond’s preservation sisterhood, deserves a hefty amount of credit for securing The Valentine’s massive Cook Photo Collection, which documents Richmond, its residents and its annual events across classes and races from the 1880s through the 1940s — a rare undertaking, considering the times.
In the early 1950s, Catterall, The Valentine’s longtime librarian, learned through researchers Alfred Kocher and Howard Dearstyne that octogenarian photographer Huestis Cook had thousands of prints and boxed negatives taken by himself; his father, George; and other photographers stored in the attic of his home on the outskirts of Richmond.
Huestis Cook, circa 1910 (Photo courtesy Cook Collection 1244, The Valentine)
Under Huestis’s guidance and with the help of volunteers, down those boxes came.
Some of the long-stored-away images became part of a 1952 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts photography exhibition, “Southern Exposure,” which also toured the country. Others found their way into Kocher and Dearstyne’s book “Shadows in Silver.” And the entire stash, over 10,000 glass-plate and film negatives, then came to The Valentine in 1954, when Huestis’s widow sold them to the museum. Through Nov. 10, The Valentine is showing “Developing Richmond: Photographs From the Cook Studio,” featuring about 40 prints.
In 1999, Richmond magazine writer Harry Kollatz Jr. wrote about the photographers Cook and included this quote from George: “There is only one thing to be done to meet success. You must get a better picture than anybody else can get. It is hard work sometimes; but there is beauty in every face (my motto) and you must find it.”
George Cook, circa 1890 (Photo courtesy Cook Collection 1250, The Valentine)
An art student who mastered early photographic techniques in the 1840s, George moved to Richmond in 1880 after a stint managing Mathew Brady’s studio in New York and doing portraiture and some Civil War combat coverage from Charleston, South Carolina. He made his home on Bon Air’s Hazen Street in 1886, and his studio was downtown at 913 E. Main St. Son Huestis ran the business after his father’s death at 82 in 1902 and is credited with much of the Richmond lifestyle and landscape photography in the collection.
Over the past three years, through part-time work, Laura Carr, The Valentine’s show curator, has catalogued and overseen the digitization of 1,400 of the 10,000 images, and she continues. Images that stand out to Carr include those of then-new Broad Street Station, which was completed in 1919. “Its lobby, its light fixtures, the men working in the kitchen, its shop ... all vastly different compared to how we travel today.”
