Big Cameras, Big Trees: Darius Kinsey at Large in the Woods

Ended April 20, 2014; Old City Hall

Throughout his fifty-year career in commercial photography, Darius Kinsey captured the monumental interaction between men, machinery and mammoth trees that defined early logging in Northwest Washington. His compositional aesthetics were refined through the use of large-format cameras, which preserved detail down to the grain of tree bark, the sheen off a locomotive and the grime on a lumberjack’s shirt.

At the time of his death in 1945, some 4,500 of Darius Kinsey’s original negatives remained – a collection that, since 1978, has had a permanent home at the Whatcom Museum. This exhibition draws from Kinsey’s substantial portfolio to present a number of lesser-known works, as well as some of his perennial “greatest hits.”