Kevin Barton

All About Norman

One rainy Bostonian day, while I was perusing eBay for old photographs, I serendipitously stumbled across an auction titled “Beautiful Babies” consisting of thirty black and white large format negatives. Curiosity bested me, and I clicked the link to find an array of photographs from the 1940’s depicting small children being pushed, pulled, and molded into various positions by a photographer and studio assistants in an attempt to find that one striking and natural-looking pose the parents would want to purchase. Delighted by the sheer oddness of the process the photographer had adopted, I decided to bid on the auction. I enjoyed the way the photographer of these particular images seemed to leave a kind of keyhole into his process by positioning the camera a touch too far away from the subject, exposing the manipulation, theatricality, and method of operation inherent to picturemaking. These remnants of staging – hands entering the frame, hanging wires, taped up backdrops, light stands –would later all be cropped out, completing a fantastical image. Several days later, victorious after winning the negatives, I began to look through the sellers’ other items. Thus, my obsession was born.

The sellers were the Krouse family, a couple in late middle-age that ran a side business of collecting unwanted junk from various flea markets and estate sales in hope that they may find a covetous individual like myself willing to buy the items on the auction site. As I began searching through their other listings – page after page of old, discarded photographs – I discovered something that delighted me: many other auctions of negatives from the very same portraiture studio were listed under headings such as “Beautiful Women” and “Handsome Men”. Like a true fanatic, a sick glee swept over me at the idea of collecting them all as I began to bid on all of the auctions from this particular studio. After winning several additional auctions, I simply had to know more and I contacted the Krouse family to inquire about the images and to see if they could tell me any more about who made the photographs or where they came from.

As I learned from the Krouses, the photographs were made by a man named Norman Daniel Schroth (adorably nicknamed Norm and Normy) in the portraiture studio that he ran as well as a camera shop between the 1940s to the 1960s in Decatur, Illinois. Later on he moved to Florida to open a series of camera and film processing shops named Mr. Click’s Camera Service. After his death in 2007, the Krouse family bought a massive lot of his images and personal possessions from an estate sale conducted once his family had sifted through and removed any items they refused to part with. The Krouses told me that not only were they selling his portraiture work (of which they had an enormous amount) but, also, his vast collection of vacation slides, family snapshots, home movies, and a plethora of personal possessions including letters, snips of hair, receipts, documents, and much more. We often strongly link photographs with memory and experience, so I was shocked, perhaps a bit naïvely, to find not only that a family would part with what I would have described as its heirlooms and history, but also to discover that there was a raging market for these kinds of items. In a strange and queasy way it made sense: humans have always had an odd but understandable preoccupation with  anonymously observing the lives of others. These kinds of materials catered to that desire in a very direct way.

I was curious about Norman and interested in attempting to learn about him from his images but, more importantly, I was interested in saving him from slipping from consciousness. Though this act was, in a way, futile, I assure the reader that I had only the best of intentions. What had been collected was a mountain of images and documents thrown together in a jumble of potential meanings and readings I, perhaps foolishly, thought could be made sense of. The best way to attempt to bring order to this scenario, I schemed, was to return the collection to an archival state. I was going to organize, catalogue, and preserve the artifacts in a way I thought may bring some clarity and teach me about their creator. This was not going to be an easy task. I had to act quickly as more auctions were being listed every week, subtracting little by little from the coherent collection. I devised a plan to obtain as many possessions and records of Norman’s as I could manage. This was not simply going to be a collection of this individual’s work I was going to reconstruct; I saw it as far more than that. This was an exhaustive rescue mission. I furiously began buying every auction I could manage, often staying in on weekends and refreshing my screen in the fear that someone might outbid me at the last minute. When an auction was plucked from my grasp by some fascinated third party slipping in, I often contacted them and attempted to work out an arrangement to purchase the images. More often than not, they were simply interested in old photographs and not specifically in Norman’s, so I would attempt to strike a deal or trade for some other old photographs I had collected through the years. The Krouse family caught on that I had an unhealthy obsession with Norman’s images and began emailing me on a weekly basis letting me know how many new batches of his images they had posted. I had to give them credit; they knew what they were doing.

I eventually contacted them to attempt to work out a deal to buy large lots rather than the thirty image batches that had become the standard with the auctions. In an act I would like to think was mostly kindness with a dash of pity, they began selling me large batches of hundreds, sometimes even thousands of items, as the boxes of negatives and records in my possession began to grow at a vaguely alarming pace. In the end, I was able to amass an estimated twelve thousand of Norman’s images, as well as a plethora of personal possessions and documents.