Drinkwater, Harry, 1919-2014

Harry W. Drinkwater was born in Bakersfield, California on March 28, 1919 and grew up in Yountville, in one of the area's only Black families. At around age 13 he left his family and headed south to San Diego, Los Angeles, and Venice, but returned to Yountville in 1938 to finish high school. He joined the service in 1942 and was stationed in Weymouth, England as part an all-Black unit of the communication corps. At the very end of his tour of duty a turn at the camera during the shooting of his company's group photograph provided his first encounter with the possibilities of photography.

After the war, Drinkwater returned to Bakersfield but eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he worked odd jobs, before joining the Civilian Conservation Corps, working at the Mexico-United States border near Tecate. From 1947 to 1949, Drinkwater used the G. I. Bill to attend the Fred Archer School of Photography, which had been founded in part to train veterans. Archer, who worked early on in the pictorialist style, had also been a movie studio photographer and an early proponent of advertising photography. His curriculum, which prepared veterans for work in commercial photography, joined formal experimentation with Hollywood film-style portraiture.

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