A book to be launched this week explores the life and work of a man who created some of the most iconic photographs in West Kootenay-Boundary history.
Henning von Krogh is the author of R.H. Trueman: Photographer, which provides both biographical details of Richard Trueman and many examples of his photos.
Trueman had studios in Sandon, Kaslo, Revelstoke, Grand Forks, and Vancouver in the 1890s and early 1900s. His most reproduced image (which is seen above and on the book’s cover) shows a Kaslo & Slocan Railway train perched on Payne Bluff in 1900.
This vertigo-inducing photo, which has appeared on postcards, posters, and fridge magnets, demonstrates the rugged terrain that local railways were built through and the nerves of steel required by those who operated them.
It further reveals Trueman’s skill as a photographer and willingness to lug his camera and glass plates into difficult locations in search of the perfect shot. You wonder how he convinced the train engineer to stop for the photo and how he persuaded the men on board to pose cliffside.
Trueman produced many other stunning images of railways, mountains, and sternwheelers that now have added historical value.
Von Krogh, who is the president of the Silvery Slocan Historical Society and has written four other books on local history, recalls that about a dozen years ago, he was looking for old photos on his house, which was built in 1894.
The museum had a Trueman shot of Carpenter Creek with New Denver in the distance. Scanned at 600 dots per inch, you couldn’t enlarge the photo much before things started to get fuzzy. But von Krogh rescanned the image at 2400 dpi and lo and behold, “you can see the buildings and there’s our house. So that kind of got me going on Trueman.”
Trueman was born in Brampton, Ont. in 1857. His parents died when he was young and he was then raised by an older sister. By age 15, he was a tinsmith. At 25, he went into partnership in a hardware store. He then went to Manitoba, presumably to homestead, but his time there was brief. By 1884, he had returned to Brampton and purchased a photography studio. It’s not clear if he’d ever picked up a camera before that.
Trueman sold the business in 1888 and took on a partner, Norman Caple, with whom he came west, photographing the Canadian Pacific Railway. Trueman’s earliest surviving work is from this period.
Caple soon retired from the business, but Trueman continued on his own. He fell in love with the West Kootenay and for a dozen years, he worked itinerantly and maintained several studios — some in tents — where he would set up for a few weeks at a time, offering both portrait and landscape work.
Trueman was hardly the only photographer in the area at the time, so what makes his work so special? “The clarity of his photographs, the detail,” von Krogh says.
Plus Trueman had a knack for timing. He was in Sandon the week the town burned down in 1900, and he produced a series of before-and-after images.
Trueman died in Vancouver in 1911 at age 54. His photographs survive in many collections, including the City of Vancouver Archives, the Vancouver Public Library, and the Royal BC Museum and Archives, as well as the archives of the West Kootenay-Boundary communities where he worked.
While Trueman’s prints form a remarkable legacy, he didn’t leave any memoirs or business records. So to round out his biography, von Krogh turned to digitized newspapers, such as the Brampton Conservator for details on Trueman’s early photographic career.
One tantalizing lead came in the BC Archives, whose catalogue indicated it had two folios of Trueman’s work numbered nine and 13. One was called “Views of Sandon, by R.H. Trueman” and the other “Views of Nelson, Kootenay River, and Lake District.”
“These were in a box in the archives,” von Krogh says. “And I thought, ‘This is it. I’ve struck gold.’” Unfortunately, the folios weren’t as advertised. Rather, they were both jumbles of miscellaneous photos.
As for von Krogh’s favourite Trueman photo? “There’s one of a big cedar tree in Stanley Park which I really like. I grew up on the coast and it just struck a note with me.”
Von Krogh has included 95 Trueman photos within the 80-page book, which will be launched Wednesday at the Silvery Slocan Museum in New Denver at 7 p.m. Von Krogh will do a slide show of Trueman’s work.
