History and travel, hung on the wall.
I grew up reading the local newspaper every morning at the kitchen table, front to back, before school. Somewhere along the way I found the World Almanac and read it the way other kids read novels: cover to cover, then again the next year when the new edition came out. Batting averages, state capitals, election results, who won what and when. I liked knowing that things had actually happened, on a particular day, to particular people.
That habit grew into a love of going to the places where history happened. Museums first, then the cities themselves: Boston and its Revolutionary-era streets, Washington, DC with its monuments and archives, and above all London, where every street seems to have a plaque and every plaque has a story. I have never gotten tired of standing on the spot where something took place and trying to picture it.
Century Studio Prints comes out of that. It started when I realized that the most remarkable photographs of the early twentieth century, from a heavyweight title fight under the summer sun to opening day at a brand-new ballpark to a 1900 photochrom of Mount Rainier, are sitting in public archives, faded, scratched, and mostly forgotten. I wanted them on my own wall. Then I wanted to make them available to anyone who feels the same way.
Each print begins with a public-domain photograph, most from the Library of Congress. I restore the damage, keep the film grain, and add color with a light hand in the muted tones of period hand-tinting. Then I compare the finished print against the original, detail by detail, and reject any restoration that is not faithful to what the camera saw. The travel posters follow the same rule: real places, designed as original art in the spirit of the 1930s poster tradition.
This is a passion project, run from Austin, Texas, by someone who still reads the paper every morning. Every piece has a real date, a real place, and a real story. I hope one of them ends up on your wall too.