Klugh, Alfred Brooker

Persona

Klugh, Alfred Brooker

6 May 1882-1 Jun. 1932

Alfred Brooker Klugh, academic and amateur photographer, (born at South Hampstead, London, England, 6 May 1882; died at Kingston, Ontario, 1 June 1932) came to Canada with his parents in 1896. After a session at the Ontario Agricutural College in Guelph, Klugh studied botany and zoology at Queen's University, Kingston, graduating in 1910 with his Master of Arts degree. From then until his death he was associated with the university in one of several teaching capacities. He obtained his Ph.D. in zoology from Cornell University in 1926, and was made an associate professor in 1930. He was killed in a train-automobile collision only two years later.

As early as March, 1900, when he was only 17, Klugh helped found the Wellington Field Naturalists Club. Shortly thereafter he became a charter member of the Great Lakes Ornithological Club. While at Queen's he founded or organized several other naturalist clubs. He also wrote widely aabout many nature subjects in both Canadian and foreign magazines.

Klugh was president of the Queen's Camera Club during the teens, and wrote articles on nature photography for the American Annual of Photography in 1916 and 1917. His major contribution to photography was, however, in the "Nature and Wildlife" column which he wrote monthly for the American Photographer from March 1924 until June 1932: several pages of editorial material on a wide variety of subjects, concerned with photographing wildlife or nature in general, and offering considerable technical guidance. Each article carried several photographs - often his own - which looked out of place beside the pictorial work found in the rest of the magazine. He tried hand-colouring prints, and by the mid-1920s, he was experimenting with colour photography, probably transparencies.

Alfred Klugh was the only Canadian amateur whose work was regularly published in any photographic magazine, American or British. His column was evidence that an audience existed which sought an outlet in accurate scientific photography, rather than in pictorialism.

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