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by Brian Horrigan
Spring 2002 (Volume 58, Number 1, pgs. 2-15)
Within a few weeks of his triumphant solo flight to Paris, Charles Lindbergh as being called the "World's Most Photographed Person"–-a title that, though unverifiable, was certainly believable. The camera loved Lindbergh, with his matinee-idol looks, unruly blonde locks, and grin. Growing up for the most part as an only child surrounded by adults, Lindbergh was also the frequent target of family photographers. Like many middle-class Americans in the early 1900s, his family probably took their "snapshots" with brand-new, easy-to-use Kodak cameras.
By the age often or so, Charles was taking many photographs himself and keeping them in neat albums with stiff black-paper pages. In 1938 he donated three intact albums to the Minnesota Historical Society. They are interesting not just because they belonged to a famous person but also because they are relatively rare examples of early twentieth century photo albums kept by children or young adults. The albums contain photos taken in Little Falls, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and other places Lindbergh lived as a child; at the Panama Canal, under construction when 11-year-old Charles and his other visited in 1913; at the Kentucky ROTC camp that the college boy attended in the summer of 1921; and at the two Army air cadet camps he attended in 1923-24 in Texas, where many of his shots documented airplane "crack-ups."
Young Charles seems to have had a camera with him wherever he went. In his account of the 1915 rowboat trip with his father down the Mississippi, he mentions losing one camera and stopping off to buy another one. In The Spirit of St. Louis, in a flashback to his first parachute jump in 1922, he writes about reaching into his pocket and pulling out a camera to "photograph the 'chute's silhouette against the sky." When Charles was away from home as a young man, he often sent film to his mother for developing. In one priceless letter, 19-year-old Lindbergh writes about a suitcase he is sending home: "Unpack it carefully.... There are quite a few pictures. Please have the rool [sic] of films developed and one print made of each. Don't throw anything away. 2,176,343rd time.*"
The adult Lindbergh continued to take photographs from time to time, such as the pictures he made on survey flights in the 1930s with his wife, Anne, and the first snapshots of their tragically fated son, Charles Jr. Still, after May 1927, he was more often on the other side of the camera's lens, hounded by photographers for just one more shot." He quickly grew to hate newspaper reporters and loathed even more deeply the photographers who inevitably accompanied them. He even occasionally took to wearing a disguise to avoid being recognized. The face of Lindbergh–once the "most photographed" in the world–gradually disappeared from sight.
*Journal, 1915, Charles A. Lindbergh and Family Papers, MHS; The Spirit of St. Louis (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1953), 259; Charles Lindbergh to Evangeline Lindbergh, July 19, 1921, Lindbergh Manuscript Collection, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.