He was photographing the MIA galleries, but he was almost certainly the best subject in them that day. This was 1937, and the young man—looking like he walked off the Hollywood set of a Yukon musical—was an early adopter of small, handheld cameras, what were then called “candid cameras.”
Today, the MIA allows photography in most galleries, but camera-toting visitors were novelties in 1937. “Although candid cameras seem to have become part of the standard equipment of a great majority of American adults,” the MIA Bulletin intoned that December, “they have not yet, so far as is known, been put into operation in a museum. It has occurred to the Institute that pictures taken by the candid camera may be interesting not only in themselves but in comparison with more studied photographs….”
Indeed. So in connection with a photography exhibition, the museum invited “candid camera addicts” to shoot the galleries—for three days only in the depths of winter, December 28 to 31, 1937. Some visitors, presumably, even photographed the art.
Watch for more Once at MIA flashbacks every Monday at MIA Stories.
Photo courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.