Galloway, Ewing

Ewing Galloway (1881-1953) was an American journalist and photo editor, and ran the Ewing Galloway Agency in New York City. He began his working life as a lawyer in Henderson County, Kentucky, working in his spare time for The Gleaner, a county newspaper. Gradually journalism drew more and more of his interest, and after a journalism course at Columbia University in New York he took a series of newspaper jobs that led him to the Midwest, to California, and eventually to Hawaii before he returned home to Kentucky to work again for The Gleaner . After completing his internship there, he returned to New York where he worked as assistant editor for Literary Digest and freelanced on the side. He became photo editor for Collier's and then worked for Underwood and Underwood.

In 1920 he opened his own photographic agency on 28th St. in New York. Although he had relatively few photographs at first, he soon expanded his stock and 1925 purchased a collection of 8000 images of Africa and Asia. By 1928 the agency was successful enough to expand; in the following years Ewing Galloway branches opened in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Boston, London, Berlin, and Amsterdam. By handling only general topics as opposed to time-sensitive news photographs, Galloway established a profitable market niche while pioneering the photographic interpretation of industry, transportation, and commerce. He also provided trained photographers for hire for studio or location work. One of these was Maclean Dameron, a respected photographer from Henderson County, Kentucky, whom Galloway hired as a full-time associate in 1941.

The "Ewing Galloway" byline that appears under many photographs reproduced in books, magazines, schoolbooks, and encyclopedias, refers to the agency and not to Galloway himself, who learned to operate a camera only later in life. The caption was an advertising device: it could be left off, but the photograph would cost more without it. The lack of records from the company makes it impossible to identify the actual photographers. Nevertheless, the images that survive from the early years of Galloway’s agency preserve striking historical glimpses into everyday life, familiar locations, and means of employment. Though produced for journalistic purposes, their fine qualities of composition and execution suggest that a skilled photographer with an artistic eye was standing behind the lens. Though the men-and perhaps women-who clicked the shutter remain anonymous, we enter easily into what they saw, at the moment they saw it.

The agency's holdings amounted to some four hundred thousand images by the time of Galloway's death. Today, Ewing Galloway, Inc. manages and markets a portion of the photographic assets of the original agency.

From the guide to the Ewing Galloway Collection of Photographs, 1900-1930(?), (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)