Constellation Similarity Assertions

Anders Beer Wilse came to America as part of the largest wave of Norwegian immigration. During the 1880s, ten out of every thousand inhabitants left Norway annually in search of new land and economic opportunity. Wilse had a degree in engineering and found employment with Minneapolis railroad companies surveying for new lines in the Midwest.

Wilse's experience was typical of all immigrants in that he was forced to move from place to place as his job changed frequently. He arrived in Seattle in 1890, where he was hired by the Great Northern Railroad to survey the crossing of the Cascade Mountains. Wilse's earliest known Pacific Northwest photographs are from this period, documenting the construction of the Great Northern line across the Cascade Mountains in 1892-93. Wilse moved to British Columbia when much new construction came to a halt in the Panic of 1893, but returned to Seattle in 1896 to work as a cartographer. In 1897, he began work as a tax assessor for King County; it was this experience that drove him to his career in commercial photography. "I saw numbers in the streets and talked numbers in my sleep," wrote Wilse. "I decided I could not take it anymore. I quit my job. [...]Two days after I quit my work as an engineer I became a scenic photographer." Wilse first joined in partnership with established photographer Daniel W. Kirk, running the Seattle office and developing and printing the images taken by the traveling Kirk. Frustrated by this division of labor, after six months Wilse bought the business from Kirk.

...

View Constellation