P24: Charles Anderson Farrell Collection

Creator: Charles Anderson Farrell

Number of Items: 414 negatives, 25 original photographs, 74 reference prints; 12 negative envelopes from Farrell's "The Art Shop" with minimal annotations and a Kensington Film Book (a negative storage folder).

Biographical Sketch: Charles Anderson Farrell was born in Yadkin County, North Carolina about 1894 and died at Greensboro in March 1977. After attending Wake Forest College, he moved to Greensboro in 1923. Farrell worked as a photographer for the Greensboro Daily News and opened a photographic studio and camera and art supply store in the city called "The Art Shop."

The University of North Carolina Press used Ferrell's photographs in several books. Nine photographs, including four bird's eye views from an airplane, are among several photographers' contributions in The Story of North Carolina (1933) by Alex Mathews Arnett and Walter Clark Jackson. In the late 1930s and early 1940s Farrell provided photographs to illustrate four other books by the University of North Carolina Press: Tobe (1939) by Stella Gentry Sharpe, Carolina Gardens (1939) by E. T. H. Shaffer, Folk Plays of Eastern Carolina (1940) by Bernice Kelly Harris, and Walter Clark, Fighting Judge (1944) by Aubrey Lee Brooks. The most notable of these volumes in terms of photography is Tobe, the story of a young African-American boy and his family's life on a farm in North Carolina. Tobe has been one of UNC Press' best selling publications.

Related Material: Charles Anderson Farrell Papers (#4452), Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A significant body of Farrell's photography is held by the North Carolina State Archives in its Charles A. and Anne M. Farrell Collection. The collection “contains the photographic negatives and prints created by Charles Farrell while he was engaged as a commercial photographer in Greensboro during the 1920s and 1930s. There are also some copy negatives and prints that pre-date this time. During the late 1930s, Farrell took numerous photographs of the North Carolina coastal region, particularly of a fishing club in Onslow County. The collection contains a number of these images. Additionally, there are some photographs of the Cherokee Indian Fair in the mountains. Portions of the photograph collection were taken by Anne Farrell while she was a partner with her husband in operation of the Art Shop in Greensboro.”

Series Descriptions

The Charles Anderson Farrell collection comprises three series, one for each book title represented in the collection:Tobe, Folk Plays of Eastern Carolina, and Walter Clark: Fighting Judge. The collection also includes photocopies of correspondence relating to the publication of the books, identification of the photographs, and acquisition of the collection.

Tobe (1939)

For the Tobe assignment, Farrell assembled a composite family from African Americans living in the Goshen community (the Garner family) south of Greensboro and possibly from within the city itself (the Goins family). The photographs show children and adults in a rural agrarian setting.

The primary portion of this series is the 222 black-and-white negatives Farrell made to illustrate Tobe, which includes all 61 of the images that appear in the book and an additional 161 alternative negatives. There are four negative formats:

• Sheet film: 7.9 x 13.5 cm (3 3/16 x 5 3/8 inches), image size 7.4 x 13.1 cm (2 15/16 x 5 1/8 inches); 45 negatives.
• Film pack: 8.6 x 15 cm (3 3/8 x 5 15/16 inches), image size 8.0 x 13.6 cm (3 3/16 x 5 3/8 inches); 136 negatives.
• Film pack: 8.0 x 11.0 cm (3 3/16 x 4 3/8 x inches), image size 7.5 x 10.0 cm (2 15/16 x 4 inches); 40 negatives.
• Roll Film: roll width 6 cm (2 3/8 inches), image size 5.6 x 8.3 cm (2 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches); 1 negative.

Eleven negative envelopes from Farrell's "The Art Shop" with minimal annotations and a Kensington Film Book with a partially completed index page have been retained. All of the negatives used for the book and a few additional negatives have corresponding interpositives and duplicate negatives made by the Photographic Archives as preservation copies.

There are sixty-four 5 x 7-inch reference prints made from the sixty-one negatives used in Tobe (i.e., there are three duplicate prints). The photographs are printed close to full frame, permitting researchers to see how the photographer composed the scene prior to cropping by the editor. In the reference print made from the negative for the chapter "Tomatoes for Winter," one can see the image without the additional retouching that added tomatoes to the plants and bushels as seen in the book.

The single 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 negative may have been made by the book's author, Stella Gentry Sharpe, who initially submitted her own photographs for the project. Deemed unsatisfactory, UNC Press hired Farrell to make the images. The image appears in the chapter "Halloween Fun."

The secondary group in this series is a set of twenty-nine negatives, ten of which are 8.6 x 15.0 cm film pack negatives and nineteen of which are 35mm frames. Retained with the negatives is an order envelope from "The Art Shop" labeled "Tobe's Cousins" and, in different hand writing in red ink, "apparently this proposed book was never published." The film pack negatives are individual portraits of a young girl and boy; the 35mm negatives are group portraits and farming scenes.

Folk Plays of Eastern Carolina (1940)

This series comprises 107 negatives and 34 photographs: 58 8.0 x 11.0 cm film pack negatives and 49 35mm frames. Several of the negatives have corresponding interpositives and duplicate negatives made by the Photographic Archives as preservation copies. There are 25 photographs (approximately 3 3/8 x 4 3/8-inches) that were likely made contemporarily to the negatives. The Photographic Archives made nine 5 x 7-inch reference prints from the original negatives.

A section of Folk Plays of Eastern Carolina entitled "Dramatis Personae: Photographic Studies by Charles Farrell" is composed of sixteen images that illustrate characters and scenes from the plays. Negatives for twelve of these photographs are extant, only eleven of which have corresponding small photographs. There are, conversely, fourteen small photographs made from 8.0 x 11.0 cm negatives that do not appear in the book. None of the sixteen photographs in the book originate from the 35mm negatives.

Walter Clark: Fighting Judge (1944)

Walter Clark: Fighting Judge includes nine images made by Farrell, one of which is a panoramic view made from two negatives of fields at "Ventosa," Clark's ancestral home on a large plantation along the Roanoke River in Halifax County. (Northern forces burned Ventosa during the Civil War.) Other images include a bronze buck statue at "Albin," the colonial mansion built in the early 1800s on the Clark family estate at Scotland Neck; a dike along the Roanoke River, two descendants of slaves, and a section of the slave quarters at Ventosa; a tester bed once used at Ventosa; and Walter Clark's law office building in Halifax.

Items in this series consist of fifty-six negatives and one 5 x 7-inch reference print, made from the original negative, of slave cabins that is nearly identical to the view depicted in the book. (Both negatives are in the collection.) The series contains nine of the ten negatives used for the book; only the negative of the tester bed is lacking. Of the fifty-six negatives in this series, twenty-two are 8.0 x 11.0 cm and thirty-four are 35mm negatives. Farrell used the latter format to photograph African American subjects and the bronze buck statue at Albin. Film pack negatives mainly depict views of fields, river views, barns, cattle, and slave cabins at Ventosa; two negatives are exterior views of Clark's law office in Halifax. Several of the negatives have corresponding interpositives and duplicate negatives made by the Photographic Archives as preservation copies.

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