Stanley+Jacobs

=__Biography__=

=Early Life=

//Newsboy//
Stanley Jacobs was born in Rochester, New York in 1874, and lived in a small cramped apartment. At age 9 he was selling newspapers on the streets. The newspaper boy life was hard, during the cold winters he saw many of his friends die due to the terrible conditions. A few of his comrades even got their obituaries published in the paper, they were some of the only working class people of the era to receive recognition in the papers of their deaths. The Newsboy lifestyle was one of brother-ship. Many of the boys shared the same harsh lifestyle and fought hard to stick up for one another. On slow news days the boys would shout ridiculous headlines to get attention, like one boy, Henry Dockter, who once shouted, "Extra! Extra! Big shipwreck in the subway! Two dead men found alive!"[3] Although this was an extremely harsh early stage of his life, it also was his first exposure to journalism, which would turn out to be a life long career of his.

//Eastman Company//
At age 15 Stanley got a job in the [|Eastman Company] where he became fascinated with the new art of photography. The Eastman Company was founded by George Eastman in 1881. George Eastman became famous for being one of the first people to produce on a large scale photographic gelatin dry plates using his invention of the emulsion-coating machine. Previous photographers had had the inconvenience of using the much more cumbersome wet plate technology, which had to be developed almost immediately after exposure, while the plate was still wet (which along with having severe time restraints, was also quite a messy process). During the years when Stanley is working in the company the new Kodak film camera had just been invented. The camera consisted of a film strip that could take 100 photos. In order to mass market this product in a society, where photography still seemed foreign and complicated, the company adopted the slogan, "You press the button--we do the rest." For this was truly the case. Once a photographer finished his film he/she sent the film back, the company developed it, and sent back the fully developed pictures. During his early years in the company, Stanley works constructing the cameras, however later takes on the role as a developer.

//New York Herald//
At age 19 Stanley got a job as a photographer for the New York Herald (Famous for the commissioning of Henry Morton Stanley who said, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"). Photography in newspapers wasn't incredibly common at the time, however it was on the rise, and by the late 1930s and early 1940s it was incredibly common, and by 1942 it gained national recognition when the Pulitzer prize extended its journalism awards to photographic journalism. The first ever photograph to appear in a newspaper was in 1873, when a photo of Manhattan's Steinway Hall appeared in the New York Daily Graphic.[5] Stanley, by this standard, would have been an exceptional case, but in no way unrealistic. The majority of Stanley's life after getting his job at the Herald was a series of adventures touring America for the newspaper.

// Assignments and Photography's Development //
One of Stanley's earliest photo assignments was the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. During this time box and folding-roll cameras were becoming quite popular (see pictures below). As a result the Eastman Company expanded, and built a six-story Camera Works building on State Street, to increase manufacturing of the cameras.[1] His next assignment was to capture Theodore Roosevelt's dedication of the [|North Entrance Arch] in Yellowstone National Park in 1903. By this time the Kodak company's famous $1 Brownie camera's were being mass produced. The cheapness of the camera made photography accessible to almost everyone (see ad below). In 1909 he covered the [|Baseball World Series] where he saw the Pittsburgh Pirates win against the Detroit Tigers, and even managed to pick up a Honus Wagner baseball card (this is also where he runs into Giuseppe Di Antonio). His final assignment was in 1915 when he covered the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. This was a world's fair made to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal.

=Death= = //The Pandemic of 1918 Unfortunately for Stanley his life was not long-lived. His life was cut tragically short during the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. His constant travels made him highly susceptible to the disease, and with not much adequate medical care during the time, he was left to die at the young age of 44. It is estimated that during the pandemic 20,000,000 people were infected with influenza and pneumonia in the United States, and of those, approximately 850,000 died.[6] Stanley had his obituary published in the New York Herald along with the Newspaper boys of the time. // =

Stanley Jacob's Camera's:
[2][4] [2]

Stanley Jacob's Bibliography