Sutter museum displays photos from bygone era

They were stored in a since-demolished building in Marysville before being scattered to the four winds — and have now returned to Yuba City, where you may recognize a family member among them, said Julie Stark, director of the Community Memorial Museum of Sutter County.

Missing from the photographs of the early residents of this region is the identity of the subjects, Stark said.

Photographs on display in the "Portraits From Glass: Faces of Yuba-Sutter" exhibit were printed from plate glass negatives that had been stored in the Odd Fellows Building at Third and D streets before its demolition in the 1970s. Photographer Allan Lamb restored the photographs that were shot between the 1860s and 1920s when a series of photography studios were on the second floor of the Odd Fellows site.

Without Lamb's countless hours preserving the images, they wouldn't be available to be seen for the first time in a century, Stark said.

"These glass plates would still be on the shelf," she said.

Museum visitors who identify people can place the names next to the photo in an identification binder.

Yuba City resident Lamb, 69, who wrote the book "Framing Photography," served in the U.S. Air Force and managed photographic programs. He has established the Image Restoration Center to save California's photographic history.

Marysville in the late 19th and early 20th century was a city where people would go to have photographs taken that would cost them a month's worth of pay, Lamb said. Photographic equipment of the era explains the formal poses that were common. Cameras required a long exposure and subjects had to hold perfectly still for an extended time.

A person being photographed had to decide "what face you wanted to show the world — now and forever," the museum exhibit notes.

Another missing piece of information, Stark said, is "we don't always know the photographer."

The museum lists scores of photographers from this region in the 19th and early 20th centuries. John James Reilly is among the best known and operated a studio at the Odd Fellows Building in Marysville before leaving in 1886. He was living in a boarding house in San Francisco in 1893 when he took his life after leaving a note addressed to the coroner that included a reference about being unable to find work.

The museum includes a display of historic photographic equipment — among them what's described as a watch-styled camera for photographing undetected.

Lamb said he found the early 20th century camera in an English antique shop in 1973 and said it likely operates, but "I just don't know where I'd find the film."

He said the future of photography is hard to forecast. As computers keep changing, he noted, so does the way photographs are taken.

"It's about ready to explode into some new thing," Lamb said. "And I don't know what that's going to be."

CONTACT Ryan McCarthy at 749—4707 or rmccarthy@appealdemocrat.com .