Horace Bristol

American, 1908–1997

Death placeOjai, California, United States

Birth placeWhittier, California, United States

BiographyHorace Bristol
American, (1908 - 1997)

Horace Bristol started photographing in 1929, choosing to point his camera towards the architecture of Munich where he lived with his wife, Virginia. By 1930 Bristol would already start to see the political climate change due to the steady rise of Adolph Hitler's National Socialist Party. Due to the stock market crash in the US and the changing political climate in Europe, Bristol and his family returned to California. In 1931, Bristol would enroll at the newly founded Art Center of Los Angeles where he was exposed to modernist imagery by Margaret Bourke White and Charles Sheeler, sealing his interest in photography. In 1937, Bristol would be hired by LIFE magazine as one of their first staff photographers. While at LIFE, Bristol would propose a story about the migrant workers in California's Central Valley. Initially refused by LIFE, Bristol approached Fortune magazine. The project was approved, spawning his collaboration with writer John Steinbeck. Bristol's photographs and Steinbeck's interviews of the worker in Central Valley would form the foundation for Steinbeck masterpiece, the Grapes of Wrath. During World War II Bristol was one of a select group of five photographers who worked under the direction of Edward Steichen documenting the war for the Department of the Navy. Bristol's colleagues would be Charles Fenno Jacobs, A Boston based photographer for LIFE and Fortune; Victor Jorgenson, a reporter and photographer for the Portland Oregonian; Charles Kerlee, a commercial photographer from Los Angeles; and a young ensign named Wayne Miller. After World War II, Bristol would move to Japan, where he would spend the next two decades. In 1956, devastated by personal tragedy Bristol burned all the negatives and photographs that he kept at his home in Japan. At Bristol's Tokyo photo agency, his son packed the remaining work into trunks, where they remained untouched for thirty years. In 1985 Bristol reclaimed his forgotten work, gathered materials languishing in archives, and at the age of Seventy-six began promoting his work again.

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