‘My jaw was dropping,’ said Granite Falls woman as she looked at photo collection
By Larry Magrath
As a kid growing up by Hills in Rock County, Angela Steinbach of Granite Falls, remembered her grandmother taking photos of everyday life on the farm. Often, she and family members and friends were natural subjects of the lens. As a photographer herself, she can now appreciate what her grandmother and later her mother were up to. But recently she began a project that would show her the full breadth of her grandmother’s lifelong love of capturing the impermanence of everyday life.
Visitors to a Granite Area Arts Council exhibit in Granite Falls recently took in a display of some of the works of her grandmother, Anna Finke, born in 1910. In a rare photo of herself, Finke is pictured along with family members. Finke was most comfortable though behind the lens capturing scenes of everyday life on the farm, as well as the not-so-ordinary scenes on a family vacation.
“She took photos of us like it was the digital age and not just my siblings and I but all of the grandchildren,” Steinbach said. “My grandma’s family really seemed to be the ones that she photographed the most, the direct family on the farm. Notably, she always posed the kids and her husband Alvin on tractors and different equipment, bikes, tractors, cars.”
The collection of her grandmother’s life hobby was passed down to Steinbach’s aunt, then her mother, and finally to her after a family home was cleared out and sold. Photo books of Anna’s works were made for each grandchild with extensive labeling.
“I can’t even imagine how many thousands of photos she has,” said Steinbach. “My main goal is to digitize all of the reels from decades of travel. She didn’t just take photos here but she took them around the world, Europe, Alaska, Hawaii, eastern coast of the U.S. They didn’t stay put and that surprises me too for that age group. They traveled throughout the duration of it. My ultimate goal with it is to be able to digitize all of her photos and then get them to where they need to be, to be appreciated in a historic fashion because I don’t think this was the norm for people to take photographs like this at that time.”
In her grandmother’s collection are photos from the Great Depression in the 1930s. Steinbach said she’s impressed that even during the frugal financial times there was still a priority to capture the moment or the current time in photos or reels.
A photograph of her grandmother with the Foshay Tower in the background is of special interest. The Minneapolis landmark was completed in 1929 and with 32 floors and modeled after the Washington Monument, was the tallest building there for 48 years. Eventually, Steinbach would like to explore the area to see if she can find the exact vantage point where her grandmother once visited.
A photographer herself, Steinbach has found herself retracing the footsteps of her grandmother and capturing refreshed images of certain natural landscape scenery. She has been published across the state in tourism, chamber and state publications. The love of photography connects the generations of her family in a positive way and her young children are beginning to learn as well.
“Once people are gone all you have are the pictures and that’s when you see the value,” Steinbach said. “My grandmother had been taking photos, and excellent photos, for years. As a kid you don’t realize…”
While kids busied themselves playing outside on the farm during family visits, the adults would descend to the darker basement to review the latest family vacation films.
“I think the generations are different and that generation would get together on Sundays for meals and holidays and then they would go downstairs and watch the reels and us being little kids, we were tooling around outside,” Steinbach said.
The family wasn’t the stay-at-home type. Vacation films shot with a Super 8 included trips to Europe, Alaska, and Hawaii. Shots were not the typical tourist shot as well standing outside a familiar landmark.
“My jaw was dropping,” Steinbach said. “You see these videos and her passion for photography. That’s where the theme emerges through generations. It really is the tie that links us. I’m guessing it will be a labor of love that will take years.”
Digitizing the body of work has shown her inside her own family with moving pictures of her mother as a teenager as well as herself, siblings and cousins as children.
Born 71 years later, Steinbach also took up photography early on when the technology was point-and-shoot cameras using film. She’s seen technology changes of her own, having started with 35-mm film cameras and graduating to camcorders that had a still photo option. She’s gravitated toward nature photography, capturing some of the same scenes visited by her grandmother. She also recently showed her works in Granite Falls, where she works as a county administrator. Her photos have also spiked some interest from historical societies around the region, state tourism agencies and breweries.
“I saw how vital it was to capture in photos the beautiful areas that are right in our backyard. More often than not people would see my photos and say, ‘I have lived here my whole life and had no idea that was here,’” Steinbach said.
Capturing pictures of local treasures that are sometimes overlooked by local residents is of special interest.
“I think my love of nature and the area really was found when I got the DSLR (digital camera) because I was able to go out to capture all the different images of wildlife and landscapes,” Steinbach said.
“Bringing that awareness has been my goal and in turn I have become a photographic historian in a sense. Throughout time buildings change, weather elements deteriorate structures, and landscapes change and my photos have followed this area for nearly two decades. In the last year and a half I have been working on sharing my photos via my social media channels,” Steinbach said.
Friend and sometimes subject Tracy Wellendorf of Montevideo has accompanied Steinbach and marvels at her ability to see the seemingly every day ordinary with the special lens of a photographer.
“She’s just a natural getting background and landscapes,” Wellendorf said. “Most importantly, I like her pictures of birds, and it reminds me of spending time when I was growing up at the lake. When you look at her photos you see the world in a totally different light then what I do.”
Wellendorf has seen first hand too how many older people could benefit from organizing their personal collections. She works at the local community center and has encouraged visitors there to view old negatives and slides on a larger monitor or television. Many times the prints have degraded or been lost or separated from the negative or slide.
Steinbach hopes to also pass on the love of photography to her young children and has made some progress in that regard. Her son Victor recently had a photo of an early morning arrival at school used by the school district and daughter Quinn has shown interest too.
“My son, who’s 10, has really started to gravitate into it and he knows what to look for. He knows cloud conditions. He knows sunrise times and sunset times.”