Charleston photographers

James M. Osborn

The senior partner of Osborn & Durbec, and the Charleston photographer who went out to Fort Sumter after its surrender and made twenty-six views of it. He was on the parapet with George S. Cook on 8 September 1863 when the monitors came in.

Osborn was born in New York in 1811 and opened a photographic studio in New York City at thirty-eight. In November 1852 he and his wife moved to Charleston and opened a gallery on King Street; Craig’s Daguerreian Registry records him at 233 King Street that year. They sold that business, and in 1858 Osborn opened a new one in partnership with Frederick Eugene Durbec.

Osborn & Durbec’s Southern Stereoscopic & Photographic Depot at 223 King Street was a depot in the full sense: pictures on one side of the business and apparatus and stock on the other. What survives of it is a stereoscopic record of Charleston, its harbor defenses and the plantations below the city that has no equal from the Confederate side.

The partnership ended in February 1862. Osborn opened his own gallery at King and Liberty streets and worked there for the rest of the war. He left Charleston for New York in February 1868 and died there later that year.

The Charleston connection

Osborn’s wartime importance rests on two occasions.

The first is April 1861. The Charleston Courier of 23 April reported that he had been allowed to visit Fort Sumter and had taken twenty-six different views of it, inside and out, and had also been to Morris and Sullivan’s islands. Those plates are the earliest sustained photographic record of the place the war began, made within days of the event.

The second is 8 September 1863, when he was with George S. Cook on the parapet of Fort Sumter as Union ironclads engaged Fort Moultrie.

War service and standing

None recorded. Osborn was a commercial photographer working in a Confederate city; that is a description of where he was, not of an allegiance, and this section does not convert one into the other.

Process and equipment

The firm’s trade was stereography — twin lenses, a card mount, and a parlor viewer — sold alongside the chemicals and apparatus other photographers needed. The mounts carry the firm’s name and street address, which is why the work can still be attributed at all.

Attribution

Who photographed Fort Sumter first, in April 1861, has been muddled for a century, and Osborn is at the center of it. Bob Zeller’s correction is the clearest statement of the position: only two Charleston firms photographed the fort after the surrender. Alma Pelot, working for Jesse Bolles, was there on 15 April, and Osborn came later — the Courier of 23 April reports his visit in the past tense without giving the days.

Prints from both series circulated on northern mounts within weeks, published by Edward Anthony, and the mounts do not always say whose negative is underneath. See the account of that April in this section.

Career

Do not confuse with

  • Osborn’s Gallery — The business, not the man. It appears on mounts as publisher of photographs Osborn did not necessarily expose.

Working locations

Where the work is

  • Library of Congress The Robin G. Stanford Collection at the Library of Congress, purchased in 2015 and digitized with funding from the Center for Civil War Photography, holds the largest published group of Osborn & Durbec stereographs.
  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art Cartes de visite published by Osborn’s Gallery are in the Gilman Collection.

See also

Frederick Eugene Durbec George Smith Cook Alma A. Pelot Jesse H. Bolles

Statement by statement

Every material claim on this page, with its standing and its source. A statement the record does not support is shown as unavailable rather than filled in.

Sources

  • Stephen Davis and Jack W. Melton Jr., 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Charleston in the War (Charleston: Historical Publications LLC, 2020).
  • Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/
  • Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection
  • “17 April 1861: Two stereo views of Fort Sumter,” Civil War Day by Day, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 17 April 2011, with a correction posted in the comments by Bob Zeller. Item: folder 222(b), Miscellaneous Pictures, #4090. https://web.lib.unc.edu/civilwar/index.php/2011/04/17/17-april-1861-two-stereo-views-of-fort-sumter/
  • John S. Craig, Craig’s Daguerreian Registry (Torrington, Conn.: John S. Craig), consulted through Pioneer American Photographers.
  • Harvey S. Teal, Partners with the Sun: South Carolina Photographers, 1840–1940 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001).
  • Frederick A. Ford, Census of the City of Charleston, South Carolina, for the Year 1861, Illustrated by Statistical Tables, Prepared under the Authority of the City Council (Charleston, 1861). The street lists give, for every house on every street, the number, the owner and the occupant. https://archive.org/details/censusofcityofch00char