Pictures
Frank M. Hohenberger
Art Through the Lens
~ by Julia Pearson
“ speak the only language all mankind can understand,” wrote Frank M. Hohenberger in his diary. It was a language he used to tell the world about his love of photography and the people and countryside in his Brown County, Indiana home.
Hohenberger was born in Defiance, Ohio to John and Louise Hohenberger on January 4, 1876. Orphaned at the tender age of five years, he was raised by his paternal grandparents with a sister and two brothers. He attended a Lutheran German language school. After his schooling, Frank was taught to set type and operate a printing press in a print shop owned by his uncle in Paulding, Ohio.
Hohenberger left Paulding in 1892 and spent the next ten years working in newspapers in Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois. Settling in Indianapolis in 1902, he worked as a compositor for the Indianapolis Star. A passage in his diary informs us that he started photographing around this time. That same year, he received his membership card in the International Typographic
Union, a membership kept current throughout his life. He was presented with a sixty-year pin in 1961.
He left the Star’ s composing room in 1909 when he became a photographer for the H. Lieber Company of Indianapolis, but returned to his former job with the Star in 1914. When he looked through an acquaintance’ s photographs of Brown County, Hohenberger became interested in the opportunities. He was sufficiently intrigued to make several exploratory trips to the area between 1912 and 1917. A change in ownership of the newspaper resulted in Hohenberger’ s losing his job in 1916. He spent a few months managing an Indianapolis camera shop before moving to Nashville in the summer of 1917.
He was 41 years old, had twentyfive dollars in savings, and an eight-dollar lens for his camera. He established a studio in Nashville and made it his home for the rest of his life. He told a magazine writer that it was“ a place with only about 300 population, with two groceries, a livery stable, a drug store, and a boarding house.” He told friends he had found a home in“ the valley of peace … restfulness that brings inspiration.”
For over forty years, he sold prints as well as doing special photographic commissions. His photography benefited from his
20 Our Brown County • Sept./ Oct. 2015