SHOOTING TEXAS

David, John and Charles Swartz—three country boys raised in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the wake of the Civil War—came to the Texas frontier to seek their fortunes. As professional photographers they found fame if not fortune. Over the course of four decades they changed both the art and business of photography in significant ways while chronicling life in the Lone Star State. Their personal lives were something else, the stuff of dime novels, marred by tragedy, marital problems, bankruptcy and mental illness.

David, John and Charles were among the 11 children born to Philip and Susan Swartz between 1844 and 1864. David, the seventh child, was born in 1854; John, the ninth, followed in 1858; and Charles, the youngest sibling, was born in 1864. Parents and children alike worked in the family mills (flour and lumber), a necessity even before the war, as Philip Swartz did not own slaves. At some point each of the brothers decided that mill work was not the life for him and hit the road. David went first, heading north to Dayton, Ohio, where he tried his hand at portrait photography and took up with Nellie Barnum, a distant relative of traveling showman P.T. Barnum with her own strong Bohemian streak. She, too, was a photographer, which in part explains David’s attraction to her. The lovers soon struck out for Texas, where they worked as itinerant photographers, traveling from small town to small town and offering their services