Photography of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

Jack Deo, a photographic historian from Marquette, will visit the Library of Michigan Saturday (April 15) for a lecture about historic photographers from the Upper Peninsula. The event, hosted by the Historical Society of Greater Lansing, is free and open to the public.

Since moving to Marquette in the early 1970s, Deo has collected nearly 1 million images that were taken in the Upper Peninsula, depicting everything from mining and lumbering operations to dancing bears and Native American tribes. His collection includes works by the late National Geographic wildlife photographer George Shiras, B.F. Childs, Harold DuCharme, Tappan Gregory, William Harris, Edgar and Merta Lemon and Reimund Holzhey, also known as “Black Bart,” who took up photography while incarcerated at Marquette Branch Prison after killing a man in 1889 during the last stagecoach robbery east of the Mississippi River.

Deo will also show off the panoramic camera Holzhey used to photograph scenes across the Upper Peninsula after his release and the first trail camera in the world, which Shiras used to take the first outdoor flash photograph of a deer in nature.