Background . On March, 8th, 1893, Otto Thaddeus White walked away from nine terms as a Jennings County Indiana schoolteacher and hung out his shingle as a photographer. The twenty-six year-old White had almost no experience in this comparatively new field, but he’d read every book he could find on shooting, developing and printing pictures. His gallery, as photography studios were called, was on the third floor of a building in North Vernon, the county’s largest town. Floor-to-ceiling windows let in outside light for illuminating his pictures. Flash cartridges, though available, were explosive and hard to control. In the beginning, North Vernon’s ‘city folk’ refused to give the new gallery their business, assuming that a man raised in the country couldn’t be much of a photographer. His first customers came, like himself, from the rural parts of Jennings County. Farmers and their families had portraits made on days that they brought their produce into market. (please click on thumbnails for full-size image) Soon enough, the quality of the young entrepreneur’s pictures increased demand for his services. White’s commercial work was always of magazine quality, and one of his first group shots stands among the best of his long career. It was of an 1893 reunion of Civil War Veterans. Group photos were difficult with the relatively slow shutter speeds of early equipment, yet each man is as clear and well-shown as in pictures of later years. To capture such clean likenesses was quite a feat. White went on to become one of a select group of photographers to successfully use a circuit or panoramic camera, which could shoot very large groups of people by exposing one inch of film at a time. During the year that straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, White was official photographer for the construction of the B&O Railroad from Cincinnati to St. Louis. Trains and the railroad would continue to figure prominently in his body of work, one photo showing soon-to-be President William Howard Taft speaking from the caboose in 1908. Otto White had a keen interest in documenting local events, and his camera fixed forever in time the horse races, fairs, parades and fires that make up the history of small town life. White worked as a photographer for sixty-eight years, retiring in 1961 at the age of 94. Over his career, he operated studios in seven Indiana counties and won seventeen prizes. Many of these were first time awards, created to acknowledge an unprecedented talent for combining fine detail and artfully-composed scenes. The photographer’s own favorite piece, seven baby rabbits huddled in a line, is a testament to his patience and sharp eye -- qualities no doubt honed by his years of teaching in one-room Hoosier schoolhouses. InHeritage wishes to honor Otto T. White and his contribution to history by featuring this online gallery of some of his best work. We hope you enjoy the show. (Please select from the categories below, then click each individual category panel thumbnail for a full-size image.)