Walter Washington Foster was born on February 22, 1857, in Norfolk, Virginia. By 1876, he had relocated to Richmond, where he worked in partnership with other photographers and eventually operated his own studio from the late 1870s to the mid-1930s.
Foster opened his first studio in 1876 in Richmond's Church Hill neighborhood at 2429 Venable Street. After this venture ended, Foster went on to work for two years at Anderson & Co. Photographic Art Palace for the photographer David H. Anderson and served as studio manager for George W. Davis & Co. from 1882-3.
In 1884, Foster formed the firm Foster, Campbell, & Co. in partnership with Benjamin S. and Charles O. Campbell, but this arrangement only lasted for two years before each party went their own way. After briefly returning to the Davis studio, Foster again struck out on his own.
Foster In 1890, he opened Fosters Photographic Gallery on Capitol Square at 112 N 9th St. This was a prime location to photograph anyone who wanted their portrait taken—including a number of famous people who came to Richmond, including Babe Ruth. Foster's studio motto was "Nothing Missing but the Voice" and this appeared to prove true as the studio photographed not only portraits, but also a wide array of life events, like christenings, graduations, weddings, funerals, and even murder scenes.
30,000 glass plate negatives by Walter Washington Foster (1857-1935). The Foster collection includes thousands of individual portraits that were done in the Foster studio.
- opened his first gallery in Richmond’s Church Hill in 1876
- In 1890 he opened Foster’s Photographic Gallery at 112 N. Ninth Street facing Capitol Square
- In 1935 Arthur W. Orpin became the successor in the business. Eventually Orpins son, W. Foster Orpin (1910-1998) took over the business which merged in 1972 to become Dementi-Foster Studios
In 1972, 30,000 of his glass plate negatives were donated to the Virginia Historical Society. Photos of the Kirksmith Sisters Orchestra (Chautauqua and vaudeville musicians of the day) are among those donated. The Kirksmiths' travel schedule eventually landed them in Virginia, where they may have performed in Richmond.
Foster’s Richmond by Sara B. Bearss and Patricia D. Thompson
In the first vears of the new century, the studio acquired a valuable asset in the person of Canadian photographer Arthur Wellington Orpin. A native of New Brunswick, Canada, Orpin, then living in Washington, D.C., married Foster's daughter Nellie Virginia in 1907. Upon returning from his honeymoon trip, Orpin joined his father-in-law's firm. For more than a decade the family and business relationship flourished. In 1921, however, Orpin left the studio to associate himself with rival firm Homeier & Clark, although he and his wife continued to live with his father-in-law.
Orpin's place was taken by native Richmonder Anthony Lodwell Dementi, a vigorous man who once said, "Any photographer who sits behind a desk never made a success of himself." While W. W. Foster handled the requests for studio portraiture, Dementi, as good as his word, specialized in fieldwork and coverage of current events for newspapers. Dementi snapped one of the most famous railroad pictures ever taken in the United States--trains of the C&O, the Sea-board, and the Southern lines passing over one another at the triple intersection at Sixteenth and Byrd streets in Richmond. In a familiar pattern, he left Foster Studio in 1924 to enter a partnership with William H. Faris, whom he bought out in 1928. At Dementi's departure, Arthur Orpin returned to his father-in-law's studio.
A degree of less-than-friendly rivalry ensued between the two studios. In May 1928 Foster moved his business to 404 East Grace Street, directly across the way from Faris and Dementi at 403. Foster's new studio featured stylish Spanish architecture, a staircase specifically designed for bridal photographs, and spacious dressing rooms.
Dementi packed up his firm and moved two blocks up to 219 East Grace. By December of that year, Foster had purchased most of the southeast side of the 400 block, including Dementi's old address.
As the effects of the Great Depression began to be felt in the Old Dominion, the fortunes of the two studios slowly reversed. Foster became ill and was increasingly forced to rely on Orpin. Dementi, on the other hand, acted as official photographer for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway and for the Richmond Blues. His photographs appeared nightly in the Richmond News Leader until 1940. His national reputation became such that he was chosen by General Electric to be one of the first photographers to test flashbulbs in the field.
Foster died in 1935 on his seventy-eighth birthday and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery. His former employee Tony Dementi was a pallbearer. The management of Foster Studio passed first to Foster's son-in-law Arthur Wellington Orpin and then to his grandson, W. Foster Orpin. In 1972 the principals were reunited when the two firms merged as Dementi-Foster Studio. Tony Dementi became president of the merged studio; his son Robert and W. Foster Orpin were vice-presidents.
At the time of the merger, the photographic archives of Foster Studio were turned over to the Virginia Historical Society. Although a studio fire in 1925 destroyed most of the nineteenth-century work, one hundred thousand glass plate negatives and countless fragile nitrate negatives remain to chronicle life in the capital city in the first third of the twentieth century.
The collection is as important for what is not there as for what it contains. Like all people, W. W. Foster was a product of his time. He had a certain set of expectations, values, and social prejudices, all of which are reflected in his studio's work. Foster was a commercial photographer, not a crusader. Many modern viewers may lament his lack of a social conscience. African Americans are clearly peripheral in Foster's world-anonymous, unidentified, and silent. Although he operated in the era of lim Crow laws and the attempts of the Ku Klux Klan to organize formally in Richmond, there is little hint of tension or racial confrontation in his view of the capital. Similarly, Foster's commercial work necessarily emphasizes booming business and prosperous citizens. Problems of urbanization and the beginning of flight from downtown are entirely absent. Foster's world is not the world of Ellen Glasgow, where "[o]ne by one, they saw the old houses demolished, the fine old elms mutilated. Telegraph poles slashed the horizon; furnaces, from a distance, belched soot into the drawing-rooms; newspapers, casually read and dropped, littered the pavements; when the wind shifted on the banks of the river, an evil odour sprang up from the hollow." It is instead a world of children with nannies, brides, brave heroes, pageants and parades, sports teams, and successful businesses.
Nevertheless, the photographs of Foster Studio provide a unique research tool for a variety of students. In documenting a city both long vanished and tantalizingly familiar, the work of W. W. Foster and his assistants offers a window into the world of Richmond in the first third of this century.
