A collection owned by the Ringling in Sarasota of early 20th-century circus photographs is beginning to see the light of day. The Ringling acquired the collection of 1,700 glass plate negatives by Frederick Glasier in 1963 but only began conserving them properly in 1990, before which they sustained significant damage through transit, flooding and vandalism. (In one incident, prior to the Ringling’s acquisition, teenagers broke into a basement where the negatives were stored and tossed them like frisbees.) But the past decade has been good to circus history at the Ringling. In 2007, the cultural center opened a 60,000-square-foot expansion of its circus museum, then its Glasier photographs attracted notice from the Eakins Press Foundation, which published a book of the images.
“The fickle finger of fate caused this collection to be preserved, which it might never have been,” says Deborah Walk, who curates the Ringling’s circus collections.
Through Aug. 4, the Tampa Bay History Center displays 76 of Glasier’s photographs in the exhibition Circus! The Photographs of Frederick W. Glasier. Occasioned by the 2009 Eakins publication, which spawned a traveling exhibition that went on view at the Ringling last year, the show highlights dozens of memorable personalities in the form circus performers as well as a photographer committed to, if not obsessed with, documenting the greatest show on earth. Despite the clunkiness, by contemporary standards, of his medium — glass plate photography using a large format camera — Glasier made some of the most spontaneous-feeling and revealing circus photographs of his time.
Glasier’s interest was inspired by the seasonal arrival in Brockton, Mass., where he lived, of the Barnum & Bailey Circus — the circus that was subsequently purchased by the Ringling Brothers and made its winter home in Sarasota — as well as the Brockton Fair. Details are sketchy, but Glasier, who was born in 1866 and died in 1950, is known to have worked as a photographer for at least 30 years after taking up the profession around 1899. He had a wife but no children, and may have traveled with circuses, employed by them as a cameraperson, as well as working as a studio photographer in Brockton, where he led a local photographers’ club.
A handful of Glasier’s images selected for the exhibition underscore the massiveness of the circus as a mobile industry. In a photograph taken in 1903, more than 100 townspeople gather along train tracks to gape at a row of two dozen elephants freshly unloaded from a string of railcars. Another from the same year shows a broad avenue in Brockton overrun with spectators, the street temporarily transformed into a sea of hats as a circus parade makes its way through town. In two photos — one an expansive panorama that greets visitors to the show — the big-top tent itself takes center stage; within six hours of arrival, crew members would loft its 26,000 yards of canvas to create a shelter larger than a football field for some 12,000 circus-goers.
Of course, what happened inside the tent and outside where circus performers practiced their routines is the juicy stuff. Glasier offers behind-the-scenes looks at acrobats and acts including the “Iron Jaw,” a popular entertainment consisting of a leotard-clad woman dangling from a high wire by a hook clenched in her teeth. Quirky circus personalities such as Nettie Carrol (a parasol-brandishing Victorian lady who balances on rings held by another performer) and Pete Mardo (an acrobat-turned-clown born in Europe, like many circus players) shine brightly. As befits their personas, they alternately ham it up for Glasier’s camera or perform with quiet dignity and concentration.
Glasier’s craft is most impressive in capturing the decisive moments of dramatic performances. A good example is his 1908 photograph of Gertrude Dewar, aka Mademoiselle Omega, as she lunges atop a high wire. (Glasier must have shot the image from a ladder because his point of view places us beside the performer, able to scrutinize every detail from her corseted waist to her calm half-smile.) But a personal favorite showcases Queen, a “high diving horse,” who plunges into a pool of water from a 30-foot platform. The photograph freezes the graceful, and perhaps panicked, white horse in midair; animal cruelty concerns aside, the image is cheerfully insane.
As a celebratory slice of Americana, Circus! delights. And as a chance to meet Glasier, to the extent that a photographer’s personality can be derived from his photographs, the exhibition intrigues. During her research, Walk, the Ringling curator, was told anecdotally that Glasier’s on-the-job habits included dressing like an actor in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show — a favorite photographic subject depicted in various images at the History Center. I guess when it comes to circus characters, it takes one to know one.
This article appears in Jun 27 – Jul 3, 2013.