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George Ebling
- Wayne State University Press
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George Ebling 1886-1955 "George is the best photographer in the United States." —Henry Ford.* As early as 1896, Henry Ford had his own camera and was taking photographs of reasonable quality. Over the years, Ford's photographers produced hundreds of motion pictures and accumulated some half-million still photo images now on file in the archives of Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village. A small but very select number of these were taken by George Ebling, Ford's private photographer. George Ebling was born March 18,1886, in Detroit. His father, Peter Ebling, was a painter and paper hanger. His mother was Margaretha Burger Ebling, who died very soon after the birth of George, whereupon he was sent to live with his grandmother. His life with his grandmother was troublesome. They were very poor, and George, with his boyhood friends, was inclined to be mischievous. He had finished only four grades of public school before leaving to help earn a living. He had peddled newspapers since age seven and worked at a variety of odd jobs including some primitive flash photography and a printing process accomplished by exposing the paper through a negative to sunlight on a rooftop. He then decided to visit his aunt in California. His passage was via freight trains as a bum, he said. He sometimes stopped to work a day or two as a hired hand on a farm in order to get a good meal. His aunt's husband was a motion picture director, and in California he became even more intensely interested in photography. When Ebling returned to Detroit, he boarded at 347 Charlevoix and went into partnership with the firm of Litynski-Jakubowski and Company , which specialized in photography of corpses at funerals held in private homes—pictures of "stiffs," he complained, not at all like Hollywood . The partnership with Litynski-Jakubowski lasted about two years. The men had such differences that the more sensitive Ebling suffered a nervous breakdown in 1914 and was unemployed for a time. *From the oral reminiscences of George Ebling, recalling a statement of Henry Ford to a bystander. 97 Henry's Lieutenants Another more permanent partnership during this period was Ebling's marriage to Alice Clemett on August 15, 1911. She had been born in Cornwall, England. The marriage took place in Old Christ Church on East Jefferson Avenue in Detroit. The Eblings lived at 932 Canton Avenue in Detroit. Ebling is listed as an insurance salesman in Detroit's 1915-1916 directory. Ebling obtained work at the Highland Park plant of Ford Motor Company in 1917. He was first hired as a foreman on production work in the factory, but by 1918 he had been able to transfer to the Photographic Department, where Ford was producing motion pictures, still photographs, and artwork for advertising and educational purposes. Henry Ford was convinced of the great value of movies for instructional purposes, and he employed photographers to record factory operations, farming, lumbering, mining, ship building—nearly everything related to Ford Motor Company activities. These films were available to schools for educational use. Hundreds of these Ford films are now in the files of the National Archives in Washington. After Ford had built his new home and his tractor plant in Dearborn, his interests shifted away from Highland Park. It was then that he chose Ebling as his personal photographer. The two men had pronounced similarities. They were of similar disposition and appearance, and neither had had extensive formal education. Ford preferred to be around such people—the self-made type. He furnished elaborate equipment, including large eight-by-ten view cameras, tripods, lenses, filters, and illuminating devices. This was before the days of automatic exposure control, automatic focusing, and self-loading roll film. The only camera Ebling was known to have himself was a small Speed Graphic given to him by Eastman Kodak Company. Ebling was a meticulous operator, so the expensive instruments were used with care and deliberation. Ebling did not waste film. Ford would not have tolerated such waste. From 1919 to 1921, Ford had built houses for his employees in Dearborn, and Ebling was offered one of them. Alice Ebling, however, did not want to move out of Detroit and into the small village of Dearborn . But when the new Engineering Laboratory with Ford's office was built in Dearborn and Ebling's headquarters were transferred there, the family was convinced. In 1922, they purchased a house at 175 Adeline Street (now 22501 Edison...