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. I thought that because these other artists were well-known, that she was well-known. I was about ten when I asked my dad, 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.
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. I was fascinated by the whole thing.
When I retired in 2007, I decided I was going to work on it. I started bringing back boxes and I started scanning. There were 34 boxes of mostly negatives. I knew it was going to take a long time. I just worked on it steadily every day. And my Aunt Annabelle, her oldest daughter, had given me what was left of her diaries, 26 diaries. I started reading them and outlining them.
I kept finding fabulous things. That made it exciting. I found photos of my dad as a kid, riding ponies to school, and things I'd never seen before. I was also reading her diaries and making outlines. I had stories and the first thing I did, I wrote an article. I talked to the editor at Montana, the Magazine of Western History. She wanted me to write up an article with some of the photos. That got published in 2019. Then I started working on a book.
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. While I was doing all this research, when 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. Ninety percent of the time, they didn't even know they had them. She used her brand. Her name was Jessamine Spear and then she married a Johnson, so the brand is a J spear J. You'll see it in some of the photos in the book. That's how I identified the photos that were in these museums. Others I had already seen and I said, wait a minute, that's Grandma Jessamine's photo.
I alerted the museums and they were interested that I was working on this. One of the local museums in Bighorn County, just south of Billings, Montana, put together an exhibit of photographers from the county. They got in contact with me and included some of her photos. She was the only woman in the exhibit.
So that's kind of how it all started. Our family is just absolutely fascinated by history. When I look at these photos, I can see that that my grandmother realized that she was living history. Her father actually hired one of the well-known photographers in Montana to photograph some of his cattle business and the herds, traveling to the railroad. She got inspired that way. I realized that it was living history. And living history 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. She and her husband also leased summer pastures from the Northern Cheyenne and the Crow and made friends with those families. They went to the Crow Fair. They took photographs of them with their family.
She was at the 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and took photos of the survivors, especially the Native Americans, because she knew them. I went over to the battlefield and talked to the curator there, and they were surprised to see the photos. As I talked to people at the museums, I realized 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. 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. She started helping her mom develop those photographs and got fascinated with photography.
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. 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 part of her character. And it probably pleased her aesthetic in some way. 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. I believe that that group 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. I went to Scripps College in Claremont and our minor was humanities. We had lectures starting in early civilization forward. They were about politics, 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. 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. 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?
I wrote a manuscript and it was full of stories and photographs. 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 thought we need to find a way to help them out also. I began with that story to tell where she came from and how she got interested in things going around.
I wrote this manuscript, it's 200 pages or so. I started sending it out. Rejection, rejection, rejection. Then, through a connection in the organization that supports the Custer Battlefield, the historical association, I was referred to the man who at that time was the chief editor at the Oklahoma Press. He was very, very helpful. He encouraged me to write something for the Montana Historical Society magazine. And he told me 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, 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. So, I rewrote the manuscript and sent it to them. 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 it's very important that the point of view is a woman's point of view. She brought a different set of eyes to what was being seen then. The men would always concentrate on the men doing stuff and the work. She took pictures inside the house when it was Christmas. 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.
The other thing that I pointed out in my articles and I've pointed out in the book, is that her father told her she needed to learn how to saddle her own horse. She wanted to be involved and wanted to help with stuff. That continued with her daughters. She took photos of my Aunt Annabelle branding a calf, bringing the horses into the corral, et cetera. It was the start of women doing these things, but they hadn't been photographed doing it before.
There's a whole series of portraits that aren't in the book. 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. 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.
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?
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. She had a great love for that area of Southeastern Montana and Northeastern Wyoming. I think it shows in the photographs. 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.
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.
