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1 the octagon library project In the late spring of 1926, at the apex of his career, New Jersey–based photographer Robert William Tebbs (1875–1945) and his wife, Jeanne (1887–1980), embarked on a monumental expedition through rural Louisiana to photograph plantation architecture. They came at the invitation of New Orleans architect Richard Koch (1889–1971), with the goal of creating the first systematic, professional record of the state’s historic architecture. Koch had been commissioned by Charles Harris Whitaker , of the Press of the American Institute of Architects, to edit a book on the plantation homes of Louisiana and Mississippi, which was to be a part of the projected Octagon Library of early American architecture. Koch, Whitaker, and series editors Albert Simons and Samuel Lapham, Jr., hoped that systematic documentation of historic architecture, including plantations, would appeal to “the professional architect [and] . . . also to the cultured layman.” The envisioned twenty volumes of the Octagon Library series were to depend heavily on the work of architectural photographers —notably Tebbs and his partner, Charles E. Knell (fl. 1925–1951). The resulting photographic survey focused on plantations, which had reentered the national conscience (as an admixture of history and myth) with books such as Alcée Fortier’s A History of Louisiana (1904) and Grace King’s Creole Families of New Orleans (1921). This broadly romantic view of plantation life would soon be fixed indelibly in the public imagination with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1939). Koch was an ideal choice to edit the Octagon volume on Louisiana plantations, having demonstrated his commitment to historic preservation through sensitive renovations (emphasizing adaptive use) of Shadows-on-the-Teche (in New Iberia) and Oak Alley (near Vacherie) with his partner, Charles R. Armstrong (d. 1947). Koch described Tebbs in later correspondence as his “assistant,” but it is more likely that the two men collaborated as equal partners. They had worked together as early as 1924 in Natchez, Mississippi, and appear to have respected each other’s abilities. The result was four hundred images documenting the features and condition of about one hundred historic structures scattered across mostly rural Louisiana. But the Octagon Library project was canceled after the first volume, Charleston, South Carolina, was published in 1927. It featured the photographs of Tebbs & Knell. Tebbs retained both physical and intellectual property rights to the mostly nitrate negatives , though he seems to have distributed eight-by-ten-inch prints rather freely to architects and libraries across the country. But the Louisiana photographs were not seen by a more general audience until the AIA journal Pencil Points published a special issue dedicated to Louisiana in April 1938, reproducing fourteen of Tebbs’s Louisiana plantation photographs. Thirty years after they were taken, Jeanne Tebbs INTRODUCTION Representing Louisiana Plantations, 1926 Robert W. Tebbs and Jeanne Spitz Tebbs, ca. 1930, silver gelatin print, courtesy of the Tebbs family 2 r o b e r t w. t e b b s , p h o t o g r a p h e r t o a r c h i t e c t s sold the entire 1926 Louisiana collection to the Louisiana State Museum, where they are today preserved as the Robert W. Tebbs Collection. Billed as “Photographers to Architects and Decorators,” Tebbs & Knell handled a steady stream of commissions from architects, designers, and publishers. By the early 1920s, the pair was counted among the preeminent architectural photographers in the United States. Peers and competitors included traditional photographers such as Wurts Brothers (1894–1979), Henry Fuermann and Sons (fl. 1905–1960), F. S. Lincoln (1894–1976), Albert Levy (active 1890s), and J. W. Taylor (fl. 1885–1910). Tebbs & Knell also faced competition from commercial photographers with a modernist or internationalist orientation, such as Hedrich & Blessing (1929–present) and Nyholm & Lincoln (fl. 1930s), as well as an emerging group of progressive photographers, including Ralph Steiner (1899–1986), Roger Sturtevant (fl. 1925–1996), Paul Strand (1890–1976), Charles Sheeler (1883–1965), Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) and Berenice Abbott (1898–1991). Despite the competition , Tebbs & Knell remained in high demand throughout the 1920s. They were, for instance, the preferred photographers for Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, the largest architectural firm in the United States at the time. Tebbs’s photographs reflect many of the established conventions of architectural documentation of the era. His compositions are precise and conservative, and the finished negatives and prints reveal technical proficiency. Alternating between panoramic and detail views, Tebbs recorded the specific and characteristic features of each plantation, underscoring...

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