100 Years of Federal Forestry Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 402

If, as the Chinese proverb says, "one picture is worth ten thousand words," the reader of this volume has been spared the assault of some 4-1/2 million words. Its more than 450 photographs and other illustrations represent a small part of the pictorial treasure in the century-old collection of more than 525,000 Forest Service photographs. This collection is housed, in part, in the library of the Audio-Visual Branch of the National Archives and, in part, in the Washington Office of the Forest Service.

Gifford Pinchot began the Forest Service photographic collection. He saw in photography a valuable public educational device, an instrument to help evaluate changes in the American landscape and to aid foresters in documenting their activities for research and administrative purposes. Pinchot and his successor as Chief Forester, Henry Graves, were among the first forester-photographers. Others included Washington Office photographers A. Varela, A. Gaskill, H. B. Ayres, and W. W. Ashe, followed in later years by E. S. Shipp and Walter Shaffer. G. B. Sudworth and Edith Mosher produced a large number of photographs of the environment. Photographers working in the field (most of them technical foresters, but a few professional photographers) included: Lage Wernstedt (the northwest forest country in the early 1900's), K. D. Swan (scenic photographs of the Northern Rockies), Wally Hutchinson (Colorado and California), T. P. Lukens (the Northwest), W. J. Lubken (the Southwest), W. A. Langille (Alaska), W. R. Mattoon (State and Private Forestry activities in the East), and F. W. Cleator (recreational photographs), and thousands of researchers in the field.

More contemporary Forest Service photographers who have made large contributions to the negative files include: Freeman Heim (Lake States), "Curly" Steuerwald (Rocky Mountains), Dan Todd (Southern States), Bluford Muir (former head of the Forest Service Photo Laboratory), Ralph Fortune (current head of the Forest Service Photo Laboratory), and Lee Prater (forester-photographer and photo librarian for the Forest Service for over 30 years).

Over the years many innovations by Mr. Prater have enhanced the effectiveness, value, and permanency of the Forest Service collection. During the mid-1940's all negative captions were put on microfilm. More recently a system of computer access to this negative file was pioneered. It also provides customized catalog printouts. Nearly 100,000 of the best Forest Service negatives have been selected and transferred to the National Archives' permanent collection.

The efforts of all of the Forest Service photographers to provide coverage of the work of the agency produced a priceless source of photographic material on forestry subjects. We have used that material to form the major part of this publication.

Bill Bergoffen
November 1975

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