Walter Chappell collection

Walter Chappell (1925-2000) was a photographer and poet. He was born in Portland, Oregon in 1925 and served in World War II as a paratrooper. Chappell had met and befriended the photographer Minor White as a 17-year-old and went on to study photography and printmaking under him; he was later affiliated with White’s publication, Aperture magazine. Between 1957 and 1961 Chappell worked as the curator of prints and exhibitions at George Eastman House. In the early 1960s he co-founded the Association of Heliographers, a group of photographers which ran the Gallery Archive of Heliography in New York City between 1963 and 1965. In addition to his photographs of landscapes and the human body, he was also known for his electron photography of plants, also known as Kirlian photography. Chappell died in New Mexico in 2000.

Ray Jerome Baker (1880-1972) was born in Rockford, Illinois, where he studied photography at the Mechanic Arts High School. He spent one semester at the University of Minnesota before moving first to Portland, Oregon in 1903 and then to Eureka, California a year later. While in Humboldt County California Baker worked as a freelance photographer. He met his wife, Edith Mary Frost, in 1906 at a Socialist Party meeting. The Bakers first went to Hawaii on a wedding trip in 1908 and moved there permanently in 1910. Baker continued his photographic practice in Hawaii until retiring in 1960. He published several books, including two memoirs and several more on Hawaii. Baker’s photographs are included in the Special Collections of Humboldt State University and the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii.