Photographs that introduced Bend
The Homesteader · October 2024
In the story: 8. Carrying it forward, since 2022.
The story of Elite Studio connects early Bend photography with the work of promoting the town.
The museum’s October 2024 account traces Elite Studio to C. G. Seward and A. L. Campbell in 1910, and closes it in 1929 with the Depression. Between those dates it explains what a photographic studio was for in a town that wanted settlers, and the two sentences that name the Emblem Club are set apart below.
The second of them is the reason. A picture of Central Oregon was not a souvenir; it was the town travelling. The club that took its name from a device and gave that device away free was in the same business as the studio — putting a portable Bend in front of people who had never been here.
From the source
Local organizations such as the Commercial Club and the Emblem Club existed primarily to encourage this growth and photography was a valuable tool. If interested parties couldn’t travel all the way to Central Oregon, photography allowed Central Oregon to travel to them.
