Nobody knows my name?

I’ve been haunted by this photo, and am honesty not sure where I found it… or who the lad is.  If he is alive, he’d be pushing 100 today, and the photographer is also a mystery to me. 

I’m guessing the photo was taken in northern Mexico by one of the several Texas based photographers who worked in El Paso during the Revolution, and made a comfortable living from postcards and photos of the “troubles south of the border.”

Jimmy Hare and Felix Sommerfeld were both pioneering wire service photographers (Hare had combat photography experience, having followed the United States Army into Cuba in 1898 for Colliers‘, who also paid him the then princely sum of $200 a month to stroll across the bridge from El Paso into Juarez for his photos.  Of course, Hare insisted on combat pay).   Sommerfeld — working for Associated Press — was less well paid, but did a nice sideline selling intelligence on U.S. military operations to both the Maderos and the Kaiser.

Homer Scott — who moved to El Paso for his health — had the lens blown out of his camera while photographing one battle, and wasn’t above shouting orders to whatever unit he was trying to capture on film… hoping for more interesting action shots.

Otis Aultman, who ended up in El Paso to live out his childhood dream of being a cowboy (and figured news photographer was about the same thing) was “the only photographer Pancho Villa trusted”.  However, when  Villa started to realize how much his photograph was worth in the news market, he began insisting on being photographed by Mexican lensmen — returning at least a small sum to the Mexican economy.

Walter Horne was the guy who really made a killing out of the killing.  A pool hustler by trade, Horne realized that the bizarre Victorian attitudes about memento mori hadn’t — uh — completed died out.  And, to most people at the time, El Paso and the Mexican frontier was still the “wild west.”  Horne´s series of firing squad executions were quite popular souvenirs, and — for a price — he’d pose soldiers from Fort Bliss with a couple dead Mexicans and print up postcards to send back to moms and pops.

None of these gentlemen will be making money off this photo, if we use it, as intended, as cover art for Ray Acosta’s Revolutionary Days:  A Chronology of the Mexican Revolution (coming Spring 2010)… but I’d expect those talented scoundrels would still want their cut and I’d be happy to give them credit anyway.