User:Lx 121/Graystone Bird

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Owen Graystone Bird (male; b.1862, d.1943) was a British commercial photographer, active during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some sources give his first name as William instead of Owen, however no available sources list both Owen and William among his given names, and all sources agree on the prominent use of Graystone. The confusion of names does not appear to be the result of multiple photographers with the same 2-name combination "Graystone Bird".

Bird was a member of the 2nd-generation of a prominent family of pioneering photographers from the town of Bath, in the United Kingdom. His father, Frederic Charles Bird, a photographer and portrait painter active from the middle to late 1800s, had received a Royal Warrant of Appointment from the contemporary Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII.

The younger Bird was a skilled and respected artist, the winner of numerous photography prizes; whose talent was widely recognized during his professional lifetime. He would subsequently (and posthumously) slip into relative obscurity, as compared to other notable photographers from his era.

Aside from the simple passage of time, and the role of random-chance selection in the recognition of artistic talent, there appear to be at least 2 key reasons why Bird's work remains relatively unknown:

The first, is that much of Bird's most notable work, created during a "peak" period of his career in the 1890s and very early 1900s, involved creating photographic images for publication-and-use as magic lantern slides.

This was, at the time, a common form of popular-culture entertainment; both in private homes and public shows. However, the development of moving pictures as a form of art and entertainment, beginning in the 1890s, eclipsed the popularity of magic-lantern shows in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The media format of (large-sized) glass slides also became obsolete; replaced by "film slides" (i.e.: image-transparencies reproduced on small pieces of thin, flexible film; made either from a form of cellulose, or from more advanced sheet-plastic materials).

The second, is that the building used by Bird as his studio-workshop, which also contained the archives of his and his family's photographic work, was apparently destroyed in some event (details not specified in the available sources) which occurred in 1937. Bird was still alive at the time, age 74-5; he died in 1943, age 80-1.

Thus, by the middle of the twentieth century, the master copies of most of Bird's work had been destroyed, along with the catalogues and other records of same; and the most notable of his surviving work was stored primarily in an obscure, out-of-date, and rather fragile medium.

Bird's grandson, David Graystone Bird, is an active proponent in promoting awareness of the photographic work of his ancestors.