E. G. Barnhill set up his photography shop in the young city of St. Petersburg and employed a new type of tourist art, colorizing black-and-white snapshots taken by himself and his customers.
Visitors wanted one-of-a-kind works of art to help them remember the experience of Florida, so Barnhill produced landscapes. Unlike other colorists of the time whose images were airbrushed to appear dreamy and ethereal, Barnhill captured the state’s colors with richness and intensity. His radical experiments with uranium dyes created unearthly hues. Barnhill’s unique creations, precursors to the popular landscape art of the Highwaymen, merit a place in the story of American photography as we as being central to the story of the art of Florida. A fascinating mix of photographic realism and individual artistic vision, his work reveals both the Florida that was, and the Florida people want to believe in.