Forty-Eight Photographs from Botanist William Ashbrook Kellerman’s Expeditions to Guatemala.
Guatemala: c. 1905–1908. Forty-eight photographs measuring 3 ¼ x 4 inches, mounted on heavy cardboard measuring 4 ¾ x 5 ¾ inches. Most photographs captioned recto, mainly on negative, with some captions verso. Many stamped verso with “Photo by W. A. Kellerman”. Photos with very good to excellent contrast; overall Near Fine. Item #List3028
William Ashbrook Kellerman (1850–1908) was an American botanist and professor. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich in 1881, Kellerman taught at the State College of Kentucky and the Kansas State College of Agriculture. He founded the Journal of Mycology (now Mycologia) in 1885, and taught at the Ohio State University from 1891 until his death in 1908. While at OSU, between 1905 and 1908, Kellerman took four trips to Guatemala to collect fungus and plant samples. On his final journey in 1908, he was collecting samples for a school of tropical botany at OSU and for a book about Guatemalan flora; he contracted a fever and died, and was buried in Zacapa, near Guatemala City.[1]
Offered here are forty-eight mounted photographs from one of Kellerman’s Guatemalan expeditions (the photos are undated, and as the routes followed were generally the same between expeditions [1] it is difficult to identify the year in which they were taken). The photos were taken mainly in southwest Guatemala, though several are from the expedition’s entry and exit points at Puerto Barrios and Livingston on the east coast. Many are photos of plant life, and there is also a focus on volcanos—Volcanes Acatenango, Atitlán, and de Agua in particular—which apparently were home to many species of parasitic fungus. Some are human scenes, including the locals’ housing (some straw roof and some stucco homes), a bullfight in Guatemala City, canoes in the Rio Motagua, a smiling middle-aged man identified in the caption as an “Indian at San Lucas”, and so on.
An attractive set of photographs, of interest to historians of science and scientific expeditions.
[1] Richard M. Lowden, “William Ashbrook Kellerman’s Botanical Expeditions to Guatemala (1905–1908),” Taxon 19, no. 1 (February 1970): 19–35.
Price: $2,500.00