Interview with Tempe Javitz

Tempe Javitz is the granddaughter of Jessamine Spear Johnson, a photographer of the West. Johnson’s photos offer a unique look at early twentieth-century ranch life in Wyoming and Montana. She even took photos at the event for the 50th anniversary foe the Battle of Little Bighorn. Javitz was kind enough to do an interview with us about her book Bighorn Visions: The Photography of Jessamine Spear Johnson (South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2024).

What made you want to put this book together?

I grew up on a ranch in Southeastern Montana and my grandmother's photos were on the walls everywhere, along with other art that my parents loved, Western art. And I just thought, because I knew something, you know, from conversations at the table, that these other artists were well-known. And so I figured she was well-known. And I think I was about 10 when I asked my dad, well, where, I heard you say, you know, that so-and-so had a museum. I said, where's the museum for grandmother? And he sort of chuckled and said, no, she's been forgotten. And I thought about that for a long time because at age eight or nine, she gave me my first camera.

And then my mother was an English major and a history major and read to us. And I got really involved with books and I ended up in college as an English major and a humanities minor. And so I've always been fascinated by books and poetry and that kind of thing. And so what happened when I was busy with my adult life is that after my grandmother passed, the photograph collection came to my father. He agreed to take it in.

 And then it went into the basement at our ranch, which was good, because it was down in a dark corner in a cupboard. And I'd come home to visit and I'd go dig around in the photos and look at things. And there were some photo albums as well that were in the guest bedroom. And I was just fascinated by the whole thing. When I retired in 2007, I just decided I was going to work on it.

 We moved the photos up to my brother's place in Helena and into a fireproof cabinet, et cetera. I went home every summer to visit people, but I started bringing back boxes and I started scanning. And before all this happened, my Aunt Annabelle, her oldest daughter, had given me what was left of her diaries, like 26 diaries. And I'd started reading them and outlining them. And so I just knew this was my project, you know?

So I started scanning. There were 34 boxes of mostly negatives. I thought it would be photos, but it was little skinny negatives. So I knew it was gonna take a long time. And I just worked on it steadily every day.

 I have a scanner and I kept finding fabulous things. So it made it exciting. I found photos of my dad as a kid, you know, riding ponies to school and things I'd never seen before. And then I started sending notes and copies to cousins. And they're going, where did you find this?

So that was fun. And then I'm reading her diaries and making outlines. So I had stories and I just, that's how it all happened. The first thing I did, I wrote an article. I talked to the editor at the Montana, the Magazine of Western History. She wanted me to write up an article with some of the photos. And that was my first endeavor at writing and getting something accepted. And that got published in 2019. Then I started working on a book and figuring out what to do, right? That's how it happened.

It's been quite a journey. That's a good labor of love. What's the impact you hope this book will have? And do you have an ideal reader for it?

Actually, I always told my family, I'm going to make my grandmother famous again. And while I was doing all this research and I'd go home to Montana and Wyoming, I started visiting all the museums and I found her photographs in the Bighorn County Museum, in the Bozeman Museum, in the Montana Historical Society. And 90% of the time, they didn't even know they had them. She used her brand that her name was Jessamine Spear. And then she married a Johnson and she also invented brands. So the brand is a J spear J. So imagine a spear with a little handle down in two Js at the bottom. And you'll see it in some of the photos in the book. And that's how I identified some of the photos that were in these museums. And others I had sort of seen and I said, wait a minute, that's Grandma Jessamine's photo. And so I alerted the museums, I was working on this. They were interested.

One of the local museums in Bighorn County, just south of Billings, Montana, had put together an exhibit of photographers from the county. And they got in contact with me and got some of them. They had two or three photos. I think I sent them an extra one or two. But then they posted a couple of her photos. She was the only woman in the exhibit. I was like, oh, wow.

Anyway, so that's kind of how it all started. And what I was interested in also is that the photographs, our family, even my dad and mother were just absolutely fascinated by history and things happening. And when we would drive places across Montana, there would be road signs telling you, this is a battlefield, this is the Oregon Trail, whatever. And my mother would always insist that my dad pull over and we would read the history signs.

 So I'm looking at these photos and realizing that my grandmother realized that she was living history. And her father had actually hired one of the well-known photographers in Montana to photograph some of his cattle business and the herds and stuff, traveling to the railroad. And so she got inspired that way also. I realized that it was living history and not only just living history, but from a woman's point of view: photos of the kids and photos of the laundry on the line and all sorts of things that men don't take photographs of. Let alone the fact that she and her husband on their different ranches, especially the one that they had the longest, they were leasing summer pastures from the Northern Cheyenne and the Crow. And they made friends with those families. They went to the Crow Fair. They took photographs of them with their family.

And then she was at the 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and took all these photos of the survivors, especially the Native Americans, because she knew them. And I realized that this was very important and I went over to the battlefield and talked to the curator there, and they're going, where have these photos been? It's like, wow. So as I talked around at the museums and stuff, I realized from the comments how important her point of view was and the things that she saw.

And how did your grandmother get into photography? How did that begin? Do you know?

That's really interesting. Her mother was a frustrated artist along with raising kids, and she had tried different things and hadn't liked the results. And in 1897, she bought a glass plate camera. At that point, Grandma Jessamine was 11 years old and her little sister was only about a year old, but her little sister also grew up to be a photographer, a well-known photographer in Wyoming. She started helping her mom develop those photographs, et cetera, and got fascinated with photography.

Then in the process of working on figuring out the stories, my sister had her old piano and we found in the piano bench, a little booklet from her early years, Jessamine's early years of marriage. And it was full of notations about where she had spent money and we're flipping through it, and there is her first Brownie camera for like four dollars. In the front of each diary, she would notate the kids, where they were, if somebody had gotten married, little notations like that. And she would always list the cameras that she had at that point. She went from camera to camera. She eventually had a landscape, panorama camera. There was a whole box of panoramas. She had just moved forward. At one point, she even had a movie camera. Those are in storage. I haven't even gotten to that yet. But anyway, there was a whole process of her paying attention and talking to others. There was a camera shop in Sheridan, there was a camera shop in Billings, and she'd go in and see what was going on. There were notations in her diaries about it. So she was very interested in the progress of what the cameras were able to do.

What role do you think photography played in her life? I mean, obviously it was a passion of hers. Do you have a sense of what photography meant to her?

I think like for her mother, it was an artistic release, so to speak. It was just part of her character. And it probably pleased her aesthetic in some way. I don't really know, because I didn't, you know, ever ask her about that specifically.

 But she obviously had a passion about it and the creativity of it. She had a whole group of artists that she knew, including Hans Kleiber, who did etchings and painted in watercolor. Then there's a group of men, and she knew them all. And one of the guys was even on a pack trip with them. It's in the diaries. My other aunt, her great aunt, her sister Elsa, took a photo of them at a pack trip up in the Bighorn Mountains. And there they are sitting, talking, and you just know they're talking about, you know, photography and art, that kind of thing. So I believe that that group, you know, fed off each, sort of fed off each other's ideas, et cetera.

The photographs, they document the past, but they are also art. You mentioned how your family always valued art and history. How important do you think art is in helping us make sense of the world around us and our place in it?

I never studied art history much until I got into college, where I went to Scripps College in Claremont, where the five colleges are. It was Scripps College for Women. Our minor was humanities. And we had lectures starting in early civilization forward. And of course they were about politics, but they were also about religion and art. We had art historians talking to us. I had grown up with art around me, but I didn't know a lot about the structure and the history. And having learned that in college just broadened my viewpoint of art. I have art all over my house. It feeds the soul, you know, a beautiful landscape or a gorgeous photograph. My grandmother also collected artifacts from some of the Native Americans and I have some of those, some beaded moccasins and some beadwork and stuff. I love art. I think it enriches our lives tremendously.

That's great. Now you have so many photographs and negatives. How did you do the selection process? How did you pick what went into the book and what maybe comes for something else later?

So I wrote a manuscript and it was full of stories and photographs. I sent it out and I sort of followed the pattern of her life and told a little bit about the family and the ranching business. Her father and uncle had been early cattle barons. And her father had actually arranged for the Crow Reservation to have a fence around it so that then the cattlemen could run some of their cattle there, but also then pay them leases, because he was also tight with the Native Americans and thought we need to find a way to help them out also.

I sort of began with that story to tell where she came from in this place and how she got interested in things going around. So then I wrote this manuscript. I still have it, of course. It's 200 pages or so. And I started sending it out. Rejection, rejection, rejection. And I belong to the organization that supports the Custer Battlefield, the historical association. And I met people there that mostly men who are really interested in the Custer fight, et cetera. But I met authors and stuff there. And through a connection there, I was referred to the man who at that time was the chief editor at the Oklahoma Press. And I sent a note and then we talked on the phone and I sent him the manuscript and he came back. He was very, was very helpful. He said, this isn't what we would want to do, but who are you sending the book to? He had some suggestions.

 He also had once way back in his early career had worked at the Montana Historical Society on their magazine. And he encouraged me, because I had mentioned to him that they wanted an article. And he said, definitely do that, get started. So he kept checking back with me, and he called me and said, you need to contact the press in South Dakota and gave me the name of the editor, et cetera. I called, talked, sent the manuscript, and they came back and said, we love the photographs. They said, we think we can sell a photo book. We need you to rewrite the manuscript and concentrate on the photos and slim the stories down. And I hung up the phone and I was very upset because of the stories, et cetera. And I have a good friend, who also graduated from Scripps, who's an author and also a coach, a writing coach. She calmed me down and she said, they want to publish your book. This is important. So I rewrote the manuscript and sent it to them. And then of course we went back and forth editing, but they were very excited about the photographs and that's how that book happened.

How do you think this book will help people understand the West? Are there things that we would learn about the West from the book that we otherwise might not know or things that we would just see differently thanks to the photographs?

I think first of all—it's very important, and I even got this from reviewers—that the point of view is a woman's point of view. All of a sudden they're seeing kids riding off to school. They're seeing laundry on the line, even though she did it, you know, in this gorgeous photograph. She brought a different set of eyes to what was being seen then. The men who would always concentrate on the men doing stuff and the work. She took pictures inside the house when it was Christmas or, you know, there's the whole life there. There's everyday living on a ranch. Yes, there are pictures of brandings, there are pictures of training horses. There are also pictures of kids going off to school, it's the whole deal. There are pictures of friends visiting.

She took pictures and portraits. There's a whole series of portraits that aren't in the book, but they're in the collection of people that are neighbors, et cetera. And those will be available eventually. We're going to hopefully get this collection into a museum or some sort of archive where they can be reached. The other thing was, during the Depression, many ranchers got involved in having dudes, guests. They had guests not only at their ranch, but her father started one of the early dude ranches up in the Bighorn Mountains, the Spear-O-Wigwam. There are pictures of the guests and they're fishing and they're hiking and they're riding through the trails in the mountains. And you have all these gorgeous photos of the mountains as well.

The other thing that I pointed out in my articles and I've pointed out in the book, her father told her she needed to learn how to saddle her own horse, etc. She wanted to be involved and wanted to help with stuff. And her daughters were allowed to do things that women weren't usually doing. It was the start of women really actually being active in ranch work, not just driving a tractor, but there's the picture that's in my book, even of my Aunt Annabelle branding a calf, bringing the horses into the corral, et cetera. So actively being a participant in the work of ranching, that hadn't been documented before. It was starting to happen and women were starting to do these things, but they hadn't been photographed doing it, you know?

I bet there would be some interest in these photos as a traveling exhibit too, to different museums.

There's finally an exhibit right now at the Museum at the Bighorns in Sheridan. They're concentrating on her photos of the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn, because this is also the 150th anniversary this year.

I think very related to that, my next question is, what do you think is the importance of place in the work of an artist?

Wow, it's huge. Especially for her, because I know she really loved where she was living and that she loved being in the mountains. She just couldn't help herself wanting to be out there in the outdoors and see it all and see what's happening. So she had a great love for that area of Montana and Southeastern Montana, Northeastern Wyoming. And I think it shows in the photographs, the things that she took photos of. Some of my favorites are photos up in the Bighorn Mountains just of the lakes or the people coming around the corner of edge of a mountain and down a trail. And you can see how the mountain is and how the trail is and where they're going.

That's great. So it's the 150th anniversary of Battle of the Bighorn and it's also America 250 this year. I've been thinking a lot about states and the kind of role that they play in the broader history of the country. How do you see the place of maybe Montana and Wyoming in the broader story of the country?

It's interesting because, of course, I think Montana and Wyoming were fairly remote. You think about going up into Glacier National Park and the Blackfeet that are up there. There was a lot of battles in Montana and Wyoming. The settlers came after things got calmed down and Indians got put on reservations. But that story is there of that movement West and the conflict with the Native Americans and then the final figuring out a way to get along. It wasn't always beautiful and it was fraught. And it's still a place where we're trying I think where the Native Americans are trying to get their story across better, their heritage across better. I think those things are happening but I think it's slower than you'd like to think where we can meld those stories and tell the stories of they were there 1,000 years ahead of us, if not longer. And I think that is starting to happen more. So I think that's very much worth celebrating.

Bighorn Visions is out now. You can read more about Javitz’s work in Cowboys & Indians (2022). There are more articles and exhibits to come.