Let’s take a look at a little known photographer who worked in Golden in 1904-1905. Biographical details about Harry J. Gottleib are both limited and confusing.
Gottleib was born in New York City. Records provide his birthdate variously as April 1874 (1900 census), 1880 (WWI draft records and 1920 census) and 1886 (1930 census). Some of these dates are certainly unrealistic. At around twelve years of age, Gottleib began photographing houses for an itinerant photographer. For more than a decade, he made tintypes under the employ of a female tintypist on Coney Island. In 1894 he married Daisy Ann Brown. By 1900 they lived in northern Florida, where he worked as a photographer, first in Monticello and later in San Augustine. (It is easy to confuse him with N. I. Gottlieb, a photographer working in Ocala, FL in the 1890s, whom the press called “Artist Gottlieb.”)
In September 1904 Gottlieb set up a photo tent in Golden, Colorado where he worked for about a year. He specialized in photographs of babies for which he charged $5.00 for 16 stamp photos. Very few of his Colorado photographs are extant.
After Golden, he lived briefly in Raton, New Mexico (1906), El Paso, Texas (1907-1911) and Tucson, Arizona (1911-1912). By 1914 he resided in California, where he placed an ad in the San Francisco Examiner on March 26, 1915: PHOTOGRAPHER: first class, all round man; wants position, or will take odd jobs and piece retouching. H. J. Gottlieb, 1359 Golden Gate ave. In 1916 Gottlieb was back in Arizona, working in Phoenix (1916), Tempe, (1916-1919) and Williams (1919).
Gottlieb led a colorful personal life. He married four times. He lost a custody battle over his daughter from his first marriage. After the divorce of his third wife, Beatrice Montague “ended her own life after taking that of Hamilton W. Mannon, a motion picture executive… whose love for the beautiful girl had grown cold,” stated the Denver Post on August 7, 1927. She left a young daughter that she had with Harry.
Only when Gottlieb settled in Alamogordo, New Mexico in the mid-1920s, did his career flourish. He married his fourth wife, Bessie Graham, in 1924 and she joined him in the business. He continued to make portraits, but he also captured views of southeastern New Mexico’s stunning scenery, coloring them with oil paint. He open a second studio in Ruidoso, NM, where he sold postcards as well as other souvenirs. Gottlieb’s pictures were also published in tourist brochures. Harry Gottlieb died on August 2, 1936 of Buerger’s disease, which causes blood vessels to swell.
Special thanks to Beverly W. Brannan, former curator of photography, Library of Congress, for proof reading this post.
