1. Frederick Gutekunst was an American photographer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
24 Facts About Frederick Gutekunst
1. 2.
Frederick Gutekunst opened his first photographic portrait studio with his brother in 1854 and successfully ran his business for sixty years.
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Frederick Gutekunst grew to national prominence during the American Civil War and expanded his business to include two studios and a large phototype printing operation.
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Frederick Gutekunst is known as the "Dean of American Photographers" due to his high quality portraits of dignitaries and celebrities.
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Frederick Gutekunst's father was a cabinetmaker and the family name Gutekunst means "good art" in German.
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Frederick Gutekunst's father wanted young Frederick to become a lawyer and sent him to study law for six years under Joseph Simon Cohen, prothonotary to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
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Frederick Gutekunst found the study of law "dry and uninteresting" and instead became interested in the emerging photographic technique of the daguerreotype.
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Frederick Gutekunst was a frequent visitor to Marcus Aurelius Root's gallery and learned the craft of daguerreotype from photography pioneer Robert Cornelius.
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Frederick Gutekunst displayed an aptitude for chemistry and progressed the technique to convert a dagurerreotype image unto a printable electrotype plate.
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Frederick Gutekunst's father noticed his son's interest in chemistry and found an internship for him with a pharmacist, Frederick Gutekunst Klett.
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Frederick Gutekunst undertook a four-year apprenticeship with Klett and graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy in 1853.
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Frederick Gutekunst worked for two years at a drug store in Philadelphia and began to collect parts to build a camera.
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Frederick Gutekunst was able to purchase a lens and battery and his father built a box to house the camera.
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Frederick Gutekunst joined the Franklin Institute and used their laboratory facilities to conduct scientific experiments.
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Frederick Gutekunst created his own photographic plates coated with collodion and made ambrotypes of his friends in the back of the drug store.
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Frederick Gutekunst took photographs of numerous dignitaries and celebrities including Caroline Still Anderson, William Cullen Bryant, Grover Cleveland, William Lloyd Garrison, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William McKinley, Carl Schurz and Walt Whitman.
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Frederick Gutekunst kept detailed listings of those he photographed and one of the ledgers is housed at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
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Frederick Gutekunst worked as the official photographer of the Pennsylvania Railroad and in 1875 photographed structures and scenery which were printed as a collection of stereo views.
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Frederick Gutekunst created a ten-foot wide and 18 inch high panoramic photograph of the 1876 Centennial Exposition made from seven negatives.
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Frederick Gutekunst was as much artist as businessman and on a visit to Germany in 1878 he purchased the rights for the Phototype process.
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One year later upon visit to Philadelphia, J H Fitzgibbons, the editor of the St Louis Practical Photographer, noted that Gutekunst was manufacturing thousands of prints every day.
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Also, Frederick Gutekunst began to use what we would now call a panoramic camera which took a photo of one hundred and eighty degrees and from which the studio could produce a print thirty-six inches in length.
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Frederick Gutekunst had successfully run his photographic studio for sixty years.
24.
Frederick Gutekunst was interred at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia.