Capturing Time

David Nicoll (1877-1937)
        Photographer

David Scotty Nicoll arrived in Ketchikan in 1897 as a prospector, and subsequently mined as far out as Prince of Wales Island. In the early 1900s he worked for about a decade as a projectionist at the famous Dream Theater on Dock Street.

Mr. Nicoll's most notable legacy, though, is the unique eye that he brought to a rapidly expanding Ketchikan. Between 1910 and 1930, he documented the city as it transformed from an outpost on the tide flats outside a Native fish camp to a burgeoning, spirited, and ritzy modern city. As David Nicoll trained his camera on the hillsides and people of the town, he was in a unique position to capture the transfiguration of an even earlier, scrappier time and place.

Additional photographers featured in this exhibit

• Harriet Elizabeth Hunt (1865-1934)
  
• Con Giebel (1878-1965)
  
• Benjamin Alfred Haldane (1874-1941)
  
• Alfred Milotte (1904-1989)
  
• Otto C. Schallerer (1884-1968)
  
• Hall Anderson (1949- )
  
• Paulu T. Saari (1919-2011)