By Robert L. Spude 

Among the collections at Sharlot Hall Museum is a finely hand-made wooden box. Inside, slid between wooden tracks, stand the glass plate negatives of Clarence H. Shaw, photographer of Arizona Territory during the 1890s and early 1900s. 

The glass plates reveal his skill in the craft for they capture not just people but character, not just place but mood. He captured events not commonly frozen behind the ground glass of other territorial photographers. His glass plates are a treasure.

Glass plate negatives, or "dry plates," were used before the adoption of "film" negatives for photography. The plates were bulky and too easily broken. That they survive is a wonder since Shaw and his pack mule ranged from the Salt River Valley north to the Utah border. 

Shaw, a slender, bearded, lanky individual, like so many tubercular victims of the time, moved from Chicago to Phoenix per doctor's orders. He opened a photo studio on First Avenue in Phoenix. On the side, he sold curios and other collectibles brought from Maricopa and Pima. An advertisement mentioned that he was also an "antiquarian." 

In Sharlot Hall Museum's collections of his prints are photographs of Maricopa women selling their pottery or filling ollas. Shaw visited the Yaqui, Pima, and Maricopa villages and photographed them on the streets and at home. 

His images show sensitivity towards Arizona's many cultures. His photographs of the Native Americans he met on the streets of Phoenix and, especially the Havasupai of the Grand Canyon, reveal much about these people's early years on reservations, their fields, schools and homes. 

He also photographed Chinese and Mexican-Americans, and, of course, the Anglos on the frontier: cowboys, farmers and merchants. 

The street scenes of early Salt River Valley towns such as Phoenix, Glendale, Mesa, and Tempe capture the villages in their Victorian architectural splendor. Bicycles and horse drawn vehicles dominate the dirt streets. He also photographed the surrounding desert, now vanished under suburbia. Canals and water systems were also recorded on glass. 

The photographs of the Grand Canyon are most intriguing. His photographs show that he traveled north to Pipe Springs near the Utah border, to the south rim, and down to the falls near the Havasupai village of Supai. He took landscape photographs as well as scenes of early tourist developments, plus a classic shot of Shaw in his camp often mistaken for Buckey O'Neill. 

Sharlot Hall used many of Shaw's images in her articles published in the 'Out West Magazine', an early competitor to 'Sunset' magazine. His photographs appear in articles on the Grand Canyon, Phoenix, Williams and Native Americans. Since Hall was the assistant editor of the magazine, she also used his prints as filler in the magazine's pages. 

Shaw died around 1905. Sharlot Hall acquired the glass plates now carefully preserved at the museum she started on Gurley Street. 

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(citn144pa)
Reuse only by permission.
Clarence H. Shaw took this photo of a saloon fire on Washington Street in Phoenix in 1900. 

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(inh405p)
Reuse only by permission.
Another image by Clarence H. Shaw of a Havasupai medicine man at the Grand Canyon in 1890. 


Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(pa134p)
Reuse only by permission.
A Chinese parade in Phoenix in 1900: another moment in time Clarence H. Shaw captured.