Alma A. Pelot

Almost nothing of Pelot’s life has been established. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes him as American, active in Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1850s and 1860s; the Charleston Museum gives his name in full as Alma Alfred Pelot. Where and when he was born, and when he died, this section has not traced.

The gallery he worked for can now be placed. Ford’s census of Charleston for 1861 lists Jesse H. Bolles at No. 331 King Street, on the west side in Ward 4 — up the street from the Cook, Quinby and Osborn & Durbec galleries, and the address Pelot would have carried his plates back to.

What is documented is the work. On 15 April 1861 — two days after the surrender and one day after the Federal garrison left — Pelot went out to Fort Sumter and made a series of large-plate views. His presence was noticed in the Charleston Mercury the following day, and Bolles advertised the pictures in the papers later that month.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which holds a set of the resulting cartes de visite, is worth quoting on what he achieved:

Given that Alma Pelot was a young studio portraitist with little field experience, these modest-size prints with their rounded corners and mature balance of architectural description and human incident are extraordinary.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Terre-plein off the Gorge, Fort Sumter

The 15 April 1861 series is the beginning of the photographic record of the war in Charleston. It shows the gorge and terreplein with the guns dismounted, Confederate soldiers and top-hatted civilians draped over the pivot guns, and the flag flying over a fort that had been United States property four days earlier.

The Library of Congress holds one of these as an original photographic print under a call number in his own name — PH - Pelot, no. 1 — and credits him as photographer, citing Bob Zeller.

None recorded.

Large-plate wet collodion in the field, four days after a thirty-four-hour bombardment, on an island reachable only by boat. Everything needed to coat, sensitize and develop the plates had to go out with him and be used before they dried.

Pelot’s work is attributed rather than signed, and the attributions come from three institutions reading the same evidence. The Library of Congress credits him as photographer and notes that the creator information comes from Bob Zeller’s The Blue and Gray in Black and White, adding that Pelot was assistant to Jesse H. Bolles. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Charleston Museum both attribute the April 1861 views to Pelot and Bolles jointly.

Joint attribution is the honest form here: the operator who exposed the plate and the proprietor whose gallery sent him and sold the result are both part of how the photograph came to exist, and no surviving evidence separates their hands.