High quality photo-album by an Anglo-Canadian artist who became a leading figure in the depiction of indigenous peoples in British Columbia and Alaska.
The collection is housed in a commercially produced photo album bound in red buckram, slightly stained and scuffed, ‘Reminiscences’ in gilt on the upper cover; 12 card leaves with 8 window-mounted sepia photographs per leaf, so 96 images in all, 10.5x7.5 cm each. Inside the front cover in white ink, Pitts records that the album is ‘Containing principally, photos taken during walking tour round Norfolk and Suffolk coast August 1911.’ In fact this covers three quarters of the album; the last section is devoted to African images made while Pitts worked on railway construction in South Africa. Pitts’ East Anglian photos begin around Orford on the Suffolk coast and follow the coastal route that Pitts described in his diary (held by the Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives) with mostly architectural images of Dunwich, Walberswick, a beach scene at Lowestoft, Happisburgh, Cley, Stiffkey, Wells Quay, Nelson’s birthplace in Burnham Thorpe and round to Castle Rising. Most of the images are neatly title below in Pitts’ white ink. The final section of the album shifts focus to south Africa and in content foreshadows Pitts’ later interest in indigenous peoples. There is also at least one image of Pitts himself in playful mood in his railway uniform alongside a series of portraits of Zulus and white African colleagues as well as a handful of landscapes. This section of the album does not have Pitts’ annotated titles.
Pitts was born in 1889; this album fills in one of the gaps in his well documented life which was recently the subject of a full length monograph. In his diary he records his walking tour in Suffolk and Norfolk of 1911 ‘the coast being adhered to throughout’ which he took with his brother Bert and his all important Kodak camera, and stand, that he bought for 37 shillings. Pitts moved to South Africa in 1912, working first as a Night Clerk at Malvern, Natal, on the South Africa Railway and then Naval, Colenso where he became Station Foreman - his office is pictured in this album. Pitts notes in his diary that he always asked permission to take photographs and was often invited to revisit the local Zulus where he photographed a duplicate copy as a gift. He emigrated to Canada in 1914 and these were among the last serious photographs that Pitts took as his interest turned to painting around that time. Provenance: acquired from a source familiar with Pitts’ family.
