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    Huntington: The Levi Holley Stone Collection
    Huntington: The Levi Holley Stone Collection
    Huntington: The Levi Holley Stone Collection
    Ebook206 pages56 minutes

    Huntington: The Levi Holley Stone Collection

    By John Witek and Deborah Novak

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    About this ebook

    A flea market discovery that became an art museum sensation, this collection of photographs by Levi Holley Stone presents the city of Huntington, West Virginia, as it has never seen before. Stone’s lens reveals a city of contrasts: a blend of broad boulevards and crumbling alleys, a mix of monuments and mud. It is a place where cars share the road with horses, roughnecks loiter in pool halls, and theatergoers enjoy extravagant musicals direct from Broadway. Newcomers flocked to this commercial hub on the Ohio River, and Stone’s images of steamboats, trains, and motorcars show how they traveled. He captured the river, too, when it was frozen enough to walk across and furious enough to drown the city more than once. Stone was born in Huntington in 1898, and he photographed his hometown obsessively. Even his closest friends never knew that the photographs they took for granted were sensitive works of art.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateOct 13, 2014
    ISBN9781439647745
    Huntington: The Levi Holley Stone Collection
    Author

    John Witek

    John Witek and Deborah Novak are Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmakers. Together, they have written, directed, and produced a number of films on historical Appalachia, including Ashes To Glory: The Tragedy and Triumph of Marshall University Football, Hearts of Glass: The Story of Blenko Handcraft, and Cam Henderson: A Coach’s Story.

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      Book preview

      Huntington - John Witek

      Stone.

      INTRODUCTION

      The idea for this book came about during the first exhibition of photographs by Levi Holley Stone at the Huntington Museum of Art in 2013. An appreciation written in the show’s guestbook called the collection a national treasure and suggested that it be preserved in the form of a book.

      It seemed fitting that an anonymous critic should bestow such a glowing tribute on a hitherto anonymous photographer. During his lifetime, even Stone’s relatives and closest friends had not realized that some of his photographs were works of art. If it were not for a flea market discovery and the museum’s recognition of Stone’s gift for composition, those photographs might have remained anonymous and unseen.

      Fortunately, Stone’s photographs were not consigned to obscurity. The museum chose 80 examples for the exhibition it titled Looking Back: Huntington Through the Lens of Levi Holley Stone. The present volume from Arcadia Publishing adds 131 photographs to that number, for a total of 211 memorable images that have been brought together here for the first time.

      The Levi Holley Stone Collection originally came to light at an Ohio flea market, where the writer discovered an old cardboard box containing over 1,000 prints and negatives. The vendor explained that he had acquired the box at an estate sale in Huntington, West Virginia, and was happy to sell the entire lot for $50.

      Holding the negatives up to the sunlight, one could see at a glance that picture after picture belonged to a former age—a time when motorcars shared dirt roads with horses, and paddle-wheel steamers traveled the Ohio River. Many were typical family snapshots of kids perched on running boards and young adults clowning for the camera. But others were a revelation. They showed the city of Huntington as it has rarely been photographed. They showed it through the lens of a man who had what artists call an eye—the ability to see striking images where others cannot.

      Most old photographs are just simple records of people, places, and events and are devoid of emotion or artistry. Stone’s best images, by contrast, are immediately engaging. They draw us in. They show us the Jewel City in its unguarded moments—a gritty, busy place plastered with advertising and simmering with commerce.

      L.H. Stone was born in Huntington on August 24, 1898, and he died there in 1981. Although he made pictures that were published in the city’s newspapers and earned a little money snapping class photographs, he spent most of his spare time taking snapshots of his wife, his three children, and himself.

      Like many of his generation, Stone was self-taught and self-reliant. He was a jack-of-all-trades and was good with his hands. At different times, he worked as a lather, a paper hanger, a carpenter, a property master, an electrician, and a teamster. He was a truck driver for a power company, a librarian for a Works Progress Administration orchestra, and a custodian at Marshall College.

      Stone’s photographs date from around 1912 into the 1960s. Many have dates and descriptive captions. Most of them are black-and-white, and they were taken with several different types of cameras. Some of the places Stone snapped are immediately recognizable, such as Huntington’s Keith-Albee Theatre, the Masonic Temple, and Memorial Arch. Other pictures raise the curtain on a past that has faded from memory, a time when people traveled on streetcars and elephants paraded on Fourth Avenue draped with banners advertising Willys-Overland motorcars.

      Stone’s camera was far-ranging and eclectic. He made pictures of things that looked like fun—the roller coaster at Camden Park, Blue Sox baseball, advertisements for shows direct from Broadway. When the circus came to town, he caught the action from a second-story window while pedestrians below craned their necks to watch the clowns go by. Movie theaters and their elaborate marquees were another favorite subject, as were cars, with and without their drivers.

      Chance events and acts of God inspired other photographs. When the great 1937 flood engulfed his home on Washington Avenue, Stone snapped multiple exposures while it was happening. When the West Virginia Colored Orphans’ Home was destroyed by fire in 1922, he photographed the barren aftermath.

      Stone also had an instinct for architecture, and some of the buildings that he shot, like the bold little Hamburger Inn that stood on Tenth Street, have a tangible presence all their own. Photographs of the outbuildings on his family’s farm in Logan County deliver the same kind of punch. Unpainted and falling to pieces, these rough-hewn old barns are as tough as the farmers who built them. They have an aura of dignity because they endure.

      As compelling as photographs like these can be, however, it is the people Stone shot that mark him as an artist. Stone’s subjects are comfortable in front of his camera. Some smile broadly, others pose proudly. No one, from an urchin in front of the Opera Pool Hall to a Buffalo Bill lookalike, is reluctant to show who he or she is—nor is the photographer. Stone took numerous self-portraits that reveal a thoughtful and sometimes wry observer of the city he knew so well.

      A lifelong wage earner, Levi Stone was a member of the working class, and his photographs share a distinct proletarian perspective. He recorded things that studio and mainstream photographers would have overlooked, and his eloquent depictions of everyday life anticipate the work of street photographers like Robert Frank and Vivian Maier.

      An amateur in the original sense of the word, Stone simply loved taking photographs and was never without a camera. One may call it a compulsion or an obsession, but, thanks to his lifelong pursuit of images, he gave Huntington’s past a future.

      One

      A MAN WITH A

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