100 years ago today it would have come as no surprise to readers of the Shreveport Journal to see that the winner of the local Baby Peggy Contest had finally been revealed, since they’d been hearing about this contest in the newspaper all week:
In fact, the Shreveport Journal had been publishing articles and related ads for weeks about the Baby Peggy Contest, repeatedly mentioning that the official photography studio for the contest was the Dickeson Studio, run by husband and wife Otho and Tessie F. Dickeson. [BTW, you may recall that Baby Peggy Contests were a big thing during 1924; cf. my earlier post about the connection between photographer Ida Wilcox and the Baby Peggy Contest in Salt Lake City, Utah back in October 1924. ]
Tessie Frank started taking photos at a young age when her brother gave her a box camera at age 13. She eventutally worked as a professional photographer at the studio that Otho Dickeson had opened in Marshall, Texas in the early 1900s. She relocated along with studio when it moved to Shreveport, Louisiana in 1911. Then, in 1912, she married the boss: Tessie and Otho Dickeson got married in January 1912. The couple then ran the Dickeson Studio in Shreveport for the next ~13 years.
Although Otho and Tessie are still both listed as running the Dickeson Studio in Shreveport until the late 1920s, in 1925 Tessie buys and then runs a studio in Corsicana, TX on her own.
Tessie Dickeson ran the Corsicana studio on her own for decades. She was also very active in multiple roles with the professional photographers association in her area, elected Secretary in 1926 …
… and then President a decade later.
Tessie Dickeson eventually closed her Corsicana studio and moved to Lubbock, TX, where she continued to work as a professional photographer. But instead of running her own studio there, she worked as photographer for other people’s studios. By the time she retired from photography (a few years before her death in 1978 at age 86) she’d been a professional photographer for more than 60 years!
Throughout her career she was known as a portrait photographer. In some of the early ads, baby portraits are listed as her speciality, but she did all kinds of portraits, including school photos, wedding photos, architectural photos, etc. Below are just a few sample of photos by her:
April 1941 Architectural Forum magazine.
In 1922 she submitted the following specialty portrait to the U. S. Copyright office, where it is part of the Library of Congress photos collection:
Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-113367 DLC)
So, today we celebrate Tessie F. Dickeson, professional portrait photographer extraordinaire, whose studio was responsible for the Baby Peggy Contest photos, 100 years ago today.
P.S. The Southwest Collection Archive within the Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University has a special collection of early photos by Tessie Dickeson taken circa 1908-1918. You can find an overview of the collection on the webpage here. Some of the photos in the collection show her with her camera, ready to head off to someone’s home to take a “home portrait”. Note that some of the photos also have Tessie’s handwritten notes on how or when or where she took the images. The notes are quite fun to read. Many thanks to the Southwest Collection for scanning in the photos and notes and making them available on their website. Click here to get to the main page for the full collection of Tessie Dickeson materials at the Southwest Collection Archive.
