George Grant, the forgotten Park Service photographer

Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, William Henry Jackson, Carleton Waters, they were all early photographers featuring the great landscapes managed by the National Park Service.

But there was another photographer who was just as talented, but lived much of his life in obscurity. His name was George Alexander Grant.

Grant was the first chief photographer for the National Park Service. While his name isn’t well-known, his work is still used today in Park Service promotions, literature and web sites, often simply credited “National Park Service photo.”

But Grant did important, and beautiful work, note authors Ren and Helen Davis. The Georgia couple have compiled a new book on Grant, “Landscapes for the People, George Alexander Grant, First Chief Photographer of the National Park Service.”

Last week, the Davises gave a talk on Grant’s life and work during a Brown Bag presentation at the Glacier Park community building. Grant was born in 1891 in Milton, Pennsylvania. In his early adult life he was a fine art metal worker, but during a stint in the Army, he was stationed in Wyoming for artillery training, where he grew to love the West. Grant was a seasonal ranger in Yellowstone in 1922. And while he wasn’t much of a ranger, he started taking photos, which caught the eye of Park Service director Horace Albright.

Grant went back east and was the photographer for Penn State from 1923-1927, but what he really wanted was a job as the Park Service photographer.

“The Park Service needs me,” he wrote.

In April 1929 he secured a job as the Park Service photographer after outside funding became available. By 1931 he was named the Service’s chief photographer, a position he held for 23 years.

Grant traveled the country, driving a truck he referred to as the “hearse.” In it he had his worldly possessions, tools to fix the rig and a makeshift darkroom to develop film while on the road. His primary camera was a 5-by-7 view camera, though he also shot 120 film and late in his career, a Leica 35 mm camera.

The 1930s were the Great Depression, but it was a golden era for the Park Service, the Davises note, as then President Franklin Roosevelt poured federal funds into Park Service projects.

Grant photographed many events in the Parks. His most notable local image, and perhaps his most famous as well, was a crowd of 4,000 people gathered at Logan Pass in 1933 for the dedication of the Going-to-the-Sun Road.

But Grant didn’t just stick to roads. Many of his images are from the backcountry as well. His Glacier Park work includes photos of Grinnell Glacier from the trail and a massive ice cave at Boulder Glacier in 1932. The glacier has since melted away.

Grant also took technical photographs of projects and portraits of Park staff and other people. Researching the book was no small task, the Davises noted. The Park Service archives were in big folders, with prints organized by park, not by subject. It took hours and hours to compile the book and scan the images. They scanned 700 images for the book and calculated that Grant took between 30,000 and 40,000 images over his career, most of which he received no credit for.

Local photographer and printmaker George McFarland, who attended the talk, said Grant’s negatives were superb.

“It was as if a team of Kodak technicians had made them,” he said.

McFarland printed some of Grant’s negatives for a book McFarland did back in the 1980s.

Grant kept 37 detailed journals, the Davises said. Grant was a bachelor and never married, but the Davises were able to interview his nieces. That’s when they learned that of the 37 journals, the family had thrown out all of them but two — Grant had told them they were just boring entries that had little worth.

Grant’s career ended at the age of 63. He was working on photos for the Missouri River Basin project, when the government cut the budget. Grant was out of a job and so he retired.

He died in 1962. While he never gained the popularity of someone like Ansel Adams, the two knew each other and Grant even put Adams down as a reference on a job application.

The Davises estimate that 90 percent of the photos Grant took were never even published.

Their book is available in local bookstores, including the Montana House in Apgar.