Hi Louisville, City Editor Declan here.
I recently stumbled upon a very interesting picture in the National Gallery of Art’s public domain archive of a Louisvillian magician doing magic tricks with his family. The piece is titled “Baron La Velle (Lawrence Jones) in His Home Theater, Louisville, Kentucky.”
The subject of this picture, Lawrence “Larry” Jones, could be the topic of an article all his own — he performed on Captain Kangaroo, was the president of the Louisville Ballet, and founded Squirrelly’s Tea Room. But today I’d like to focus on the man behind the camera: Stern J. Bramson.
Bramson was born in Louisville in 1912, the son of Bessie and Louis Bramson. Louis Bramson owned and operated the Royal Photo Company, a successful commercial photo studio downtown. Stern Bramson started working for the company around the age of 10, and joined full-time after graduating from DuPont Manual High School in 1930.
This Royal Photo Company pic captures a Derby-themed window display at the Kaufman-Straus building in 1946.
Photo courtesy ASC, UofL
Stern Bramson worked on a variety of commercial projects in Louisville during his career, everything from new construction to housing conditions and company dinners.
Royal Photo Company photographed the 1966 construction of a new unit at LG&E’s Crane Run plant, which was in operation until 2015.
Photo courtesty ASC, UofL
It wasn’t until 1981 that his work received any artistic recognition. He took over the Royal Photo Company after his father’s death in 1963, and ran it for another decade before the offices were demolished and he closed the company.
In 1981, Courier Journal publisher Barry Bingham Jr. bought the Royal Photo Company’s negative collection and donated it to the UofL Photographic Archives. Stern Bramson worked as a volunteer to help them organize the collection, and UofL put on an exhibition of his work in 1984.
This exhibition caught the attention of the art world, and he spent the last few years of his life with his work on display in galleries in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco + selling prints of his photographs.
He died in 1989, leaving all profits from the sale of his prints to the Stern J. Bramson Memorial Fund, which offered an annual scholarship to a Louisville student who demonstrates excellence in photography.
Stern Bramson left behind a legacy ofphotographs that document Derby Cityfrom the 1920s through the early 1970s. You can even browse the UofL’s Royal Photo Company collection to see this history for yourself — or at least some of it. The portion of the collection available online includes 6,000+items — the unprocessed material in the library’s collection includes over 25,000 more photo negatives. That’s a lot of Louisville.
