August 28, 2005
A.C. Pillsbury Foundation
Next year is the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. In memory of this momentous event, the A.C. Pillsbury Foundation plans to host several special exhibitions and publications from the perspective of Arthur C. Pillsbury. Pillsbury, an early Los Angeles photographer known for inventing the first circuit panorama camera, documented the destruction caused by the earthquake during its earliest hours.
Arthur C. Pillsbury opened a business in Los Angeles in 1900 and lived there, photographing it and its people, until he relocated to San Francisco in 1903 to work for the Examiner as a photojournalist. He founded the Pillsbury Picture Company in March of 1906. His elder brother, a physician, lived in Hollywood at the corner of what was then North Palm and Exposition Boulevards - today Las Palmas and Hollywood Boulevard.
Copies of Pillsbury's panoramas can be found in many Los Angeles area historic photograph collections. The A.C. Pillsbury Foundation is dedicated to preserving Pillsbury's work and making it known to the general public. The foundation maintains a website devoted to this cause, and publishes a quarterly newsletter. The newsletter, "Image", carries stories about Arthur C. Pillsbury as a person, his family and work, the impact of technology and the early environmental movement, and about various aspects of California, which Pillsbury photographed exhaustively.
The organization's website features chronologies and articles of interest to historians and the public. There are articles and images explaining the work and legacy of Arthur C. Pillsbury, whose inventions included: the first lapse-time camera to be used with plants, the first nature film, the microscopic motion picture camera, the first x-ray motion picture camera, and the first underwater motion picture camera. Dedicating each of these inventions to public use and science, Pillsbury is known to have refused to patent or profit from them. He strongly believed that people need the best possible tools for understanding the natural world, so they would choose to respect and conserve that world. In many ways his work and philosophies are still relevant today.
For more information on Arthur C. Pillsbury and the A.C. Pillsbury Foundation, visit the organization's website at: http://www.acpillsburyfoundation.com/, or view the Summer 2005 newsletter at: http://imageacpillsbury.blogspot.com/.
If you have a comment, or would like to post a link or article, please use the online form at: http://www.preservela.com/contact.html