Angelyn Whitmeyer may be the last person you’d expect to contribute to the ongoing search for a Japanese photographer who found inspiration in the Great Smoky Mountains. However, the world is beginning to learn more about some cutting-edge early photographs and the unlikely hero of Great Smoky Mountains National Park through Whitmire’s new George Massa photo database.
As a child growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Whitmire doesn’t remember ever visiting Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She also did not have a strong background in photography.
“Taking photos wasn’t something we did very often in my family,” she says. “I distinctly remember my conservative use of film after I got a small camera in 1970. Should I use black and white, or would color be better? Film processing was another cost I had to take into account.
Whitmire earned her bachelor’s degree in early childhood education from Kent State University and began her career teaching first and second grade in southeastern Ohio. She switched to computer programming, became a certified public accountant, and moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979. A photographer friend showed her how to process black-and-white images in the darkroom, creating a negative and print. She purchased a 35 mm camera to film scenes she found during her travels to audit credit unions throughout North Carolina, and remained parsimonious in her use of film.
“When I moved to WNC in 2004, I was thrilled with all the flowering native plants,” she says. “With some hesitation, I decided to buy a digital camera. Great! I can take a lot of photos without worrying about the cost of film, development, or prints.
After several years of photographing native plants in all seasons, Whitmire created a website to help people identify plants. From there, she became interested in women photographers from the beginning of photography in 1839 through the 1950s, and taught a series of courses on the subject at the Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning in Asheville. The research sparked her interest in early photographers in Western North Carolina.
“I came up with a list of potential photographers to research, then searched online for books about the person and photographic archives of their work,” she says. “George Massa’s name appeared on the initial list of photographers. The two sources of information about him were William A. Hart Jr.’s article “George Massa: The Greatest Mountaineer” and Paul Bonesteel’s film “The Mystery of George Massa.”
Masa was born in Japan and came to the United States in 1906. His background and first nine years in the United States are shrouded in mystery, but people who know him know that he came to Asheville in 1915 to work at the Grove Park Inn. Photography eventually became Massa’s career, but his hobby was hiking in the mountains of western North Carolina—and in the Smokies in particular. Ultimately, it will help draw attention to the Great Smoky Mountains as an ideal location for a new national park.
“He was an artist who composed and depicted Smokies scenes with the same emphasis and intensity used by master painters,” says Bill Hart, whose writings inspired renewed interest in Massa. “He was particularly interested in the effects of light and shadow as well as cloud formations, and would often wait hours to get the perfect combination of light, shadow and cloud effects.”
Whitmire was particularly fascinated by some of the color postcards made from photos of Massa at Chimney Rock that were included in Hart’s article, but she soon found them impossible to purchase or share with class participants. The lack of prints available for purchase, coupled with the fact that the postcards contained no signed reference to Masa, reinforced what I had learned from Hart’s article, the Bonesteel film, and the notes about the items on the Pack Library’s digital collections website – they were “lost” or Much of Massa’s work, like the work of many early female photographers, was destroyed.
Whitmire began comparing the postcards with pages from the Pack Library website and prints in its collection. I studied the Masa negatives in the Ewart M. Ball Collection in the Special Collections of UNC Asheville’s Ramsey Library and made connections between them and the package information. By organizing this data and making detailed notes while comparing the images, Whitmire decided to create a database of all the images of Jorge Massa she could find.
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The database of 4,000 data points announced in November includes the Pack Library Collection, which has digitized a large number of prints found by Jamey Daniels in the Daniels Graphic Miller Print Collection; Ball Collection at Ramsay Library; Highland Historical Society Collection; and the collections at Western Carolina University and the Great Smoky Mountain Society, which were donated by Libby Kephart Hargrave. Bill and Alice Hart kindly provided access to their personal collection of Massa photographs and Western North Carolina ephemera, allowing Whitmire to document subsequent uses of Massa photographs in publications such as pamphlets and brochures. The result is approximately 1,800 unique images and 2,200 subsequent uses of those images in various publications from the 1920s until today.
“The Angelyn Database is a labor of love and dedication,” said Janet McCue, who co-authored “Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart Biography” (GSMA 2019) with the late George Ellison, and is now collaborating with Bonesteel on a new biography of George. The Great Smoky Mountain Society is scheduled to publish MASA in the fall of 2024. “For the researcher, it is the best source for discovering the archive that contains a copy of any given MASA image.”
Bonesteel says Whitmire’s database is a tremendous tool for understanding the scope of Massa’s work. “Thousands of his photographs were scattered across the region after his death – with many disappearing forever – but her work dissecting Massa’s records allowed her to make sense of the chaos, classifying and organizing what we have – and even those we don’t have.” R.”
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Next in a short line of scientists before her, Whitmire was bitten by the “masa bug” and contributed the skills she had honed throughout her life to this very important work. Her “accounts” compiled known Massa photos into a single database and clarified the scope of the missing photos as well.
“No one has ever combined all this information in one source before,” McCoy said. “And what’s even better is that she’s still discovering more.”
Whitmire hopes that “people will look in the attic, or in the box in the closet, or in an old scrapbook, and find those pictures by Jorge Massa that the rest of us haven’t seen yet.” She welcomes anyone to reach out about images that could be included in the database. Find out more by visiting GeorgeMasaPhotoDatabase.com and contact Whitmeyer at [email protected].
Frances Figart (rhymes with “panther”) is editor of “Smokies Life” and director of creative services for the 29,000-member Great Smoky Mountains Association, the nonprofit education partner of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Contact her at [email protected].
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