Houseboat of light

Exhibit of couple’s photos portrays 1895-1950 river life

Hugo and Gayne Preller sailed the Mississippi and White Rivers in this combination home and floating photo studio, docking at river towns to offer services that included gun repair.
Hugo and Gayne Preller sailed the Mississippi and White Rivers in this combination home and floating photo studio, docking at river towns to offer services that included gun repair.

HELENA-WEST HELENA -- Hugo Preller courted his wife, Gayne, with a romantic promise of wonders in the wilds and port towns of early-day Arkansas.

photo

Photos from “House of Light”

Hugo Preller provided for his wife and family by hunting and fishing along the rivers they traveled.

photo

Photos from “House of Light”

This unidentified couple probably snuggled for Gayne Preller’s camera around 1940.

photo

Photos from “House of Light”

Time obscures the circumstances of this scene as captured by photographers Hugo and Gayne Preller, who started taking photos of river life in 1895.

photo

Photos from “House of Light”

Who? Why? This photo lacks a definitive caption, but “House of Light” curator Chris Engholm likes that it makes people stop and wonder.

photo

Photos from “House of Light”

Rivergoing photographers Hugo and Gayne Preller.

photo

Chris Engholm, organizer of the Preller photographs

"Even if we have to live like gypsies," he wrote to her.

Life on the loose suited this young couple, but they didn't hitch a wagon. The Prellers set off in a houseboat, plying the Mississippi and White rivers with an uncommon array of goods and services. Hugo fixed guns and watches. He played and crafted violins. His oil paintings showed training that remains a genealogical mystery, possibly an ancestry of fine artists in Germany.

Mainly, the Prellers offered that latest of marvels around the turn of the 20th century -- photography. Portraits. Anybody could have a picture taken. Dress up to look formal, fine. Barefoot, no matter. Skin color, no difference. Have a seat on the wicker chair.

The artist at work under the cloak, behind the camera that looked like an accordion, coaxing the subtle capture of a moment out of the boxy mechanism: most often, that was Gayne (pronounced gay-nee).

She did without the foomp! of flash powder to light the subject. Lacking electricity in the houseboat studio, she took pictures strictly by means of a skylight. She and Hugo clicked thousands of photos along the way, compiling a portrait of the river, too, and river life, and their own place in the world they documented.

About 240 of their photographic images are on display in "House of Light," an exhibit at the Delta Cultural Center's Visitors Center. These are pictures they took from 1895 to 1950, and some are enlarged from snapshot-size dry-plate negatives to life-size.

Cultural center curator Bill Branch views the array as a unique chronicle of Delta history, but also with a completist's frustration. Historians will see at a glance what's missing: captions. "Most of these people are unidentified."

The Prellers did not write down or save many records to specify the names of their subjects or when each picture was taken or where. Or -- why?

Why is the big question in view of one photo in particular: the stocky, pleased-with-himself-looking gentleman with the close-cropped, blunt brow and the bushy white mustache, in a candy-striped dress accented by a picnic basket. History aside, who wouldn't wonder?

Each photo tells a story: The man in his Sunday best, holding -- like a kitten in his lap -- a revolver.

The couple on the front steps -- just about to decide, it appears, if they dare to pounce across the open space between them.

The Huck Finn-like river boy with his proud catch: a snapping turtle by the looks of it, big enough to have nipped off his bare toes. What became of him?

Chris Engholm has some of the answers. "House of Light," the traveling exhibit, is Engholm's creation, and the Bentonville-based photographer and writer hopes to find more.

The man in the woman's spring outfit, he calls "the cross-dressing mayor." The old photo has written on back of it, "Red Cross social event, 1905," Engholm says. He imagines the merry sport dolled up for laughs in order to raise money for charity. But the photo tells him more about the photographer.

Both the Prellers took pictures, but Gayne did most or all of the indoor studio work. She almost certainly took this shot, and it represents her.

It shows her ability to put strangers immediately at ease, Engholm says. For her, people would "do things in front of the camera they probably had no intention of doing." Other photos of the time make the subjects look stiff, as they had to be in order for the slow exposure to work. But hers look spontaneous, snapped off.

Her photos compare to the now better-known work of the same era by Arkansas photographer Mike Disfarmer, he says. Experts could debate the two artists' different styles of lighting and composition, but Gayne had a way. She displayed a rare talent for an art so new, she might not have known it was supposed to be difficult.

"It didn't take a lot of technical training," Engholm says, "and women were welcome."

LOOK INTO IT

Engholm has identified about 20 percent of the photos, he estimates, toward a best-guess goal of 40 percent. Some are bound to remain filed under, as Branch says: "We don't know."

The turtle-catching boy was the Prellers' second-born son, Victor. Their first boy fell from the houseboat and drowned. They had eight children in all, seven boys and one girl.

The Prellers finally shored up in the White River port town of Augusta in Woodruff County. In time, the lad in the photo grew up to have a radio fix-it shop in Augusta. And in time, his daughter inherited the Prellers' stored-away old glass-plate negatives.

"I'm a pack rat," says Gayne Preller Schmidt, 82, of Augusta. She kept everything, not just the photos, but also her grandparents' gear and her grandfather's paintings done on the shiny white insides of Arkansas mussel shells. His mussel shell masterpiece: a portrait of his beautiful wife.

"Dear wife," he called her. "Dearest." "Honey." He took her to places more cautious travelers would have called reckless, and he saw nothing but sweet bounty and wide-open potential, or so the evidence suggests.

"That's what they say," Schmidt confirms.

But all this might have remained in the dark had not Californian-turned-Arkansan naturalist Engholm paddled his canoe down the White River.

Having heard of the Preller photos -- championed by the late Little Rock photographer Greer Lile -- Engholm stepped ashore in Augusta to see what he could find.

"He is awesome," Schmidt says. For one thing, he found her.

"He came in my little shop one day."

"I had a beard, and I'd been five days on the river," Engholm says. But he'd come to the right place, and nothing else mattered.

SEE HERE

Schmidt remembers showing this drop-in visitor some of the old photos she had around at the time. Were these old things truly so interesting?

"He had his mouth open," she says.

Shown more, "the inspiration was dripping off him."

Engholm terms the find "a Delta photographic treasure." With Schmidt's permission, he began organizing the collection that would take shape as the "House of Light" exhibit.

The show debuted at the Old Independence Regional Museum in Batesville in April, backed with a grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council and National Endowment for the Humanities. Other venues have included the Lower White River Museum State Park at Des Arc and Jacksonport State Park near Newport.

After the show's run in Helena-West Helena, to April 4, an expanded version is slated for the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock, in 2016, Engholm says.

He expects "House of Light" could go anywhere the Prellers went -- any of six states they probably visited along the Mississippi -- and beyond to places they missed. Why not Chicago? Why not Hollywood?

PICTURE THIS

The Prellers' true story has all the makings of a Hollywood movie, the exhibit points out, and so it does.

Open on 16-year-old Gayne Avey, daughter of the only mercantile store owner in Columbus, Ky., a dink on the Mississippi River bank. The river does what it wants, but restless Gayne is stuck in the house, trying to make some kind of adventure out of dust rags and dish towels.

Now, here comes German immigrant Hugo Preller, already traveled and ambitious, full of dreams and seemingly endless skills, a worldly 10 years older than Gayne. Together, they escape to unlimited possibility on a sail-powered houseboat.

He provides by hunting and fishing along the way. She is about to find out she has this highly artistic eye for picture-taking. He plays the fiddle, she sings. They go where they feel like going, braving storms and the meanest of river towns, making music, making pictures, making every bound soul wish for such freedom.

Come aboard, won't you? Take a risk for adventure! Come aboard, and never look back.

In truth, her grandparents had "a lot of rough rides," Schmidt says.

They might not have seen themselves so much bigger than life. Time, like photography, has its enlargements. But they left behind plenty to say they did exactly as it appears.

The Preller collection. At some point, somebody is sure to ask in plain dollars what such a thing is worth. Schmidt says she would just as soon not know. The number would lead to another question she finds hard to answer: Is it for sale?

"A million dollars might turn my head," she says. Or a million dollars might sail by like a leaf on the river, nothing to see compared to the Prellers and their rivergoing photo shop, off to find new faces.

"Money isn't everything."

Style on 02/01/2015

Upcoming Events