User:Tillman/Ernest Knee

Ernest Knee (1907-1982) was a Canadian-American photographer who was active in the Southwest US in the 1930s and 40s. Knee was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1907 and settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1931. He became a very active and respected photographer there. He left New Mexico in the early 1940s, to take a wartime job in Howard Hughes' aircraft company in California. Knee worked for seven years as Howard Hughes’ personal photographer, and later as a cinematographer in Venezuela, where he became the first(?-check) to photograph Angel Falls, the world’s highest waterfall.

In 1949, Knee moved back to Santa Fe. His photographs weren't selling, so he started a successful woodworking business, Spanish Pueblo Doors. Knee left about 6,000 large-format negatives to his son Dana, who restored many of his father's negatives, and picked 81 large-format photos for the book Ernest Knee in New Mexico: Photographs, 1930s-1940s, published in 2005.

Knee's photographs have been displayed and collected in many museums, including the George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.