Here is a link to the DC photographers’ map. I’ve got some more photographers written down somewhere that I’ll be adding to the map soon. I found addresses on a CDV for Alexander Gardner’s studio, but oddly enough there were A: two addresses not adjacent but still proximate to each other, and B: neither one was the address I thought it was. There is still the remains of a wet-plate era portrait studio that you can see from the alley behind the National Council of Negro Women’s headquarters in the 800 block of Pennsylvania Avenue. Even though it’s not a portrait studio, I’m including Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office on the map as a point of interest because it, like so many of these studios, was presumed lost for decades but only recently re-discovered, and is chronologically and geographically contemporaneous with the studios I’m tracking. At some point I’m sure either the patrons or the staff of her bureau availed themselves of the photographic archives of the studios in the neighborhood to help in finding missing soldiers after the war.
Also interesting – Alexander Gardner began his career in Washington working as Mathew Brady’s studio manager. At some point they had a falling out and Gardner opened his own studio. I didn’t realize it was literally next door to Brady’s.
I can also now definitively place Schroeder & Rakeman’s studio in Northwest DC, having found another photographer making reference to the “Market” at Pennsylvania Avenue, which is where the Navy Memorial is currently located.
dcphotoartist 