You never know what exactly you’ll encounter when searching UC Berkeley Library’s Digital Collections. This afternoon I happened to come across some photographs taken by the Dutch-born photographer Johan Hagemeyer (1884-1962). His family immigrated to California to grow fruit trees but he soon became enamored with photography. Before long, he opened a portrait studio in San Francisco and another in Carmel-by-the-Sea. These portraits could have been taken in either location as Spanish artist Salvador Dalí and his wife Gala were spending long summers in Pebble Beach from 1941-1948. The landscape and sea reminded them of the fishing village of Cadaqués, which they had left for Paris during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) followed by New York when France was invaded during World War II.
The Johan Hagemeyer Photograph Collection in The Bancroft Library comprises the bulk of what was the photographer’s personal archive at the time of his death in Berkeley in 1962. The collection contains approximately 6,785 photographic prints and negatives, and spans from his earliest known amateur work of ca. 1908 to his later works of the mid-1950s.