“Fifty-three of the best pho­tographs of the homes and faces of the Pueblo Indi­ans, taken in the last few years by A. C. Vro­man of Pasadena, are inge­niously arranged and excel­lently repro­duced for The Amer­i­can Indian Sou­venir Playing-Cards; and a zarape in col­ors illu­mi­nates the back of each card. It is a hand­some and typ­i­cal col­lec­tion. Lazarus & Melzer, Los Ange­les, $1.”

–Adver­tise­ment from The Land of Sun­shine: The Mag­a­zine of Cal­i­for­nia and the West (Vol­ume XIII, June-December, 1900).

Thanks to a gift of Don­ald Far­ren ’58, the depart­ment recently acquired two sets of sou­venir play­ing cards illus­trated with half-tone repro­duc­tions of pho­tographs taken by noted pho­tog­ra­pher of the South­west, A. C. Vro­man.
Adam Clark Vro­man was born in La Salle, Illi­nois, in 1856, and moved to Pasadena, Cal­i­for­nia, in 1892 in hope of find­ing a bet­ter cli­mate for his wife, Ester H. Gri­est, who was dying of tuber­cu­lo­sis.  Fol­low­ing her death in 1894, Vro­man and an asso­ciate opened a store in Pasadena spe­cial­iz­ing in books, sta­tion­ary, and pho­to­graphic sup­plies.  The suc­cess of the store, which is still in oper­a­tion today as south­ern California’s old­est and largest inde­pen­dent book­store, Vroman’s Book­store, pro­vided Vro­man with the means to pur­sue his many inter­ests, includ­ing ama­teur pur­suits in archae­ol­ogy and his­tor­i­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion of the Amer­i­can Southwest.

In 1895, Vro­man took his first trip through the South­west, vis­it­ing Ari­zona and New Mex­ico, which he doc­u­mented exten­sively through pho­tog­ra­phy.  Between 1895 and 1904, Vro­man con­tin­ued to explore and doc­u­ment the South­west, col­lect­ing South­west­ern Indian arti­facts and pho­tograph­ing Native Amer­i­can vil­lages and the peo­ple and cus­toms of the South­west­ern Indi­ans (Apache, Hopi, Navajo, and Pueblo).

The Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions holds sev­eral indi­vid­ual Vro­man pho­tographs and three pho­to­graph albums, all of which can be viewed online in the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Dig­i­tal Library. Two of the Vro­man albums rep­re­sent (at least in part) the cul­tural stud­ies of the Museum-Gates Expe­di­tion of 1901, led by Peter God­dard Gates, a Cal­i­for­nia phil­an­thropist, and Dr. Wal­ter Hough of the United States National Museum.  Vro­man served as the offi­cial pho­tog­ra­pher of the expedition.

Vro­man was a man of many inter­ests, and after 1904 his atten­tion turned abroad with tours in Japan and Europe, which included col­lect­ing Japan­ese net­suke and pho­tograph­ing Euro­pean archi­tec­ture.  His last tours in North Amer­ica, in 1914, were of the Cana­dian Rock­ies and the East Coast.  Vro­man, who died of can­cer in 1916, left a sub­stan­tial col­lec­tion of Indian arti­facts to the South­west Museum, and his Cal­i­for­ni­ana col­lec­tion and six­teen albums of platino­type prints from his var­i­ous expe­di­tions were given to the Pasadena Pub­lic Library, where they are still avail­able to view by appoint­ment.  Vroman’s col­lec­tion of Japan­ese net­suke is now part of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art, which described the col­lec­tion as one “con­sid­ered to be the finest and largest in the United States at that time [1910].  This group of 2,500 pieces had been assem­bled by A. C. Vro­man of Pasadena, Cal­i­for­nia, and was pur­chased and pre­sented to the Museum by Mrs. Rus­sell Sage, one of the Metropolitan’s first great bene­fac­tors” (Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art Bul­letin, Fall 1980).

Select Bib­li­og­ra­phy

Apos­tol, Jane. Vroman’s of Pasadena: A Cen­tury of Books, 1894–1994. Pasadena: A.C. Vro­man, 1994.

Mautz, Carl. Biogra­phies of West­ern Pho­tog­ra­phers: A Ref­er­ence Guide to Pho­tog­ra­phers Work­ing in the 19th Cen­tury Amer­i­can West. Nevada City, Calif.: Carl Mautz Pub­lish­ing, 1997.

Pow­ell, Lawrence Clark. Vroman’s of Pasadena. Pasadena: [s.n.], 1953.

Vro­man, A. C. Pho­tog­ra­pher of the South­west: Adam Clark Vro­man, 1856–1916. Edited by Ruth L. Mahood with the assis­tance of Robert A. Wein­stein. Intro­duc­tion by Beau­mont Newhall. [Los Ange­les]: Ward Ritchie Press, 1961.

Watts, Jen­nifer and Andrew Smith. Adam Clark Vro­man: Plat­inum Prints, 1895–1904. Los Ange­les: Michael Daw­son Gallery; Santa Fe: Andrew Smith Gallery, Inc., 2005.

Webb, William and Robert A. Wein­stein. Dwellers at the Source: South­west­ern Indian Pho­tographs of A. C. Vro­man, 1895–1904. New York: Gross­man Pub­lish­ers, 1973.