Carl Rise and the Photography of the Black Hills

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For several decades in the early 20th century, Rise Studio of Rapid City, South Dakota, photographed the Black Hills as the region was being transformed into one of America's great automobile tourist destinations.

The studio's photographs document Rapid City, Custer State Park, Sylvan Lake, Spearfish Canyon, the Needles Highway, the Badlands, mines, dams, hospitals, roads, resorts, and countless scenic views. More importantly, Rise Studio was there as Mount Rushmore changed from an uncarved granite mountain into one of the most recognizable monuments in the United States.

Behind the business was photographer Carl H. Rise, who operated the studio with his wife, Marjorie. Their daughter later remembered her parents as the founders of Rise Studio and builders of the Rise Building on Main Street in Rapid City. Carl was producing photographic views of the region by at least the 1910s, and the South Dakota State Historical Society preserves a Rapid City postcard credited to him from 1917.

For collectors, Rise Studio is especially interesting because its work ranges from inexpensive scenic real photo postcards to historically important photographs of Mount Rushmore construction, President Calvin Coolidge, early aviation, and scientific expeditions.

Photographing the Black Hills

Rise built his business in a region that was changing rapidly.

Automobile ownership was expanding, new roads were opening the Black Hills to travelers, and communities throughout western South Dakota were investing heavily in tourism. Visitors needed maps, guidebooks, photographs, and postcards to explain what they were seeing and to carry the experience home.

Rise Studio supplied that market.

A South Dakota State Archives collection preserves a group of 1920s Rise Studio souvenir photographs depicting the South Dakota School of Mines, Custer, Needles Highway, Sylvan Lake, Spearfish Canyon, Harney Peak, the state capitol, and other regional attractions. Surviving postcards add hundreds of additional views of roads, rock formations, resorts, mines, towns, and commercial buildings.

The cards often combine landscape photography with the new infrastructure of automobile tourism. A rock formation might be photographed with a road winding beneath it. A scenic overlook may include a line of automobiles. Tunnels, bridges, lodges, filling stations, and roadside businesses appear alongside mountains and forests.

Those secondary details can make the cards particularly interesting today.

A photograph sold in the 1930s because it showed the Needles may now be equally valuable for the automobile, road sign, bridge, or tourist facility visible in the foreground.

Mount Rushmore before the faces

Rise Studio's connection with Mount Rushmore is the strongest part of its photographic legacy.

The National Park Service preserves a Rise Studios photograph showing Mount Rushmore before carving began. The granite face is untouched, with the future monument visible only as a massive rock formation rising above the ponderosa pine forest.

That photograph creates a remarkable starting point for the rest of the studio's Mount Rushmore work.

Construction began in 1927, and Rise continued photographing the mountain as blasting, drilling, and carving gradually produced the presidential faces. In one of the best-known surviving Rise photographs, workers stand and hang directly on the face of George Washington while work proceeds around them. The Library of Congress dates the photograph to about 1932 and records its copyright to Rise Studio of Rapid City.

These images are significantly more interesting than ordinary finished-monument postcards. They document the actual work of creating Mount Rushmore and show the workers, equipment, scaffolding, cables, and unfinished stone that disappeared as the carving progressed.

For a collector, a Rise card showing a recognizable stage of construction should be researched individually. The specific date, president, worker activity, or construction detail may matter considerably more than the Rise Studio name.

The landscape behind the monument

Mount Rushmore also sits within a much older and more complicated history than the monument itself.

The Black Hills, or Paha Sapa, hold deep cultural and spiritual importance for the Lakota and other Indigenous peoples. The United States recognized the Black Hills as Lakota territory in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, but prospectors entered the region after the discovery of gold in the 1870s, leading to conflict and eventual U.S. seizure of the land. The National Park Service includes this history in its interpretation of the Mount Rushmore cultural landscape.

Rise Studio's tourist photographs were created within that landscape and during a period when South Dakota was aggressively promoting the Black Hills to a national audience.

That does not diminish their value as photographic records, but it provides important context for understanding what they were designed to do. A Mount Rushmore or Black Hills postcard was not merely documenting scenery. It was also participating in the creation of a new tourist identity for the region.

Calvin Coolidge comes to the Black Hills

Rise received another major photographic opportunity in 1927, when President Calvin Coolidge spent the summer in the Black Hills.

Coolidge arrived in Rapid City in June and established his summer residence at the State Game Lodge in Custer State Park. His visit generated enormous publicity for western South Dakota and drew national reporters and photographers to the region.

Rise photographed the president during the visit.

One surviving photograph in the Library of Congress shows Coolidge standing outdoors in a Western outfit while a group of photographers gathers nearby. The image is dated July 1927 and copyrighted to Rise Studio.

The outfit itself became part of the publicity surrounding the visit. Coolidge's presence brought national attention to the Black Hills at exactly the moment local boosters were promoting Mount Rushmore and expanding the region's tourist infrastructure.

Rise Studio photographs connected to the Coolidge visit therefore have crossover appeal to collectors of presidential history, South Dakota, Western Americana, photography, and early tourism.

Larger formats can command substantially more than ordinary postcards. In 2013, Heritage Auctions sold a Rise Studio panoramic photograph captioned "Sioux Indians Entertaining President Coolidge at Pine Ridge Agency" for $687.50.

That sale should not be treated as a general value for Rise photographs, but it demonstrates how dramatically the market changes when an image combines an important event, recognizable historical figure, Indigenous history, and an unusual panoramic format.

Rise Studio and the postcard business

The postcard appears to have been an important part of the Rise Studio business.

Surviving examples are frequently genuine black-and-white real photo postcards. Many carry a title or number within the image along with a Rise Studio credit, while others identify the studio on the reverse.

Examples survive on photographic postcard stocks such as DOPS, and dealers regularly encounter Rise RPPCs from Custer State Park, Sylvan Lake, Mount Rushmore, Rapid City, and the Badlands.

Rise also produced souvenir photograph sets rather than limiting the business to individually mailed postcards. The South Dakota State Archives preserves a group of thirteen Rise Studio Black Hills souvenir photographs from the 1920s, showing that the company marketed regional photography in several forms.

The large number of surviving views suggests an organized catalog rather than occasional postcard production.

That conclusion is reinforced by federal copyright records. A 1936 copyright catalog lists numerous Rise Studio photographs, including views of Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, Harney Peak, Stockade Lake, Custer State Park, and other Black Hills attractions, each identified by catalog numbers.

For collectors, those numbers can be useful when comparing multiple examples or trying to determine whether a photograph belongs to a known Rise series.

Not every Rise Studio photograph was taken by Carl Rise

The Rise Studio credit should be treated as a studio attribution, not automatically as proof that Carl Rise personally operated the camera.

Photographer William C. Kirch worked for Rise Studio around the end of the 1920s. Surviving photographs from this period are explicitly credited "Rise Studio - Kirch - Rapid City, S.D." This provides clear evidence that the business employed or worked with other photographers whose images were sold under the Rise Studio operation.

That distinction matters when cataloging a card.

If the photograph simply reads Rise Studio, describing it as a "Rise Studio photograph" is safest. If the image carries the additional Kirch credit, then William Kirch can be identified as the photographer.

There may have been other photographers working through the studio whose individual contributions are harder to separate.

This is similar to the attribution problems found with companies such as Sawyer's Scenic Photos, Eastman's Studio, and later commercial postcard publishers. The studio name identifies the business responsible for the image, but not always the person standing behind the camera.

Photographing the stratosphere

One of the strangest and most collectible Rise Studio series has almost nothing to do with conventional Black Hills tourism.

In 1934 and 1935, the National Geographic Society and U.S. Army Air Corps conducted experimental balloon flights from the Stratobowl near Rapid City in an effort to explore the upper atmosphere.

Rise Studio documented the preparations.

The Benjamin B. Talley papers preserve a group of original Rise Studio postcards from the expedition. Card No. 808 shows Major William Kepner and Captain Albert Stevens, while No. 809 depicts the journey to the Stratobowl. Other cards show Stevens arriving by airplane, the Army transport aircraft assigned to follow the balloon, the gondola, and preparations for the flight.

These are not ordinary scenic South Dakota cards.

They sit at the intersection of aviation, atmospheric science, National Geographic history, military history, ballooning, and RPPC collecting. A Rise Studio stratosphere card should therefore be researched against those markets before being priced as a generic Rapid City postcard.

The same principle applies throughout the Rise catalog. The subject can create collector demand far beyond regional postcard collecting.

Rapid City from the ground and from the air

Rise's work was not limited to national attractions.

The studio photographed Rapid City itself, including streets, hospitals, schools, businesses, public buildings, and new construction. South Dakota historical collections contain Rise photographs of several hospitals and sanitariums, including the State Tuberculosis Sanatorium at Custer and Methodist Deaconess Hospital in Rapid City.

Aerial views are another distinctive part of the studio's output.

Surviving Rise postcards show the Black Hills and regional communities from above, turning familiar tourist landscapes into broad records of roads, development, and settlement. These cards can be especially useful when buildings, highways, railroad lines, or other infrastructure are clearly visible.

The strongest examples are often those where the nominal subject is only the beginning of the photograph.

An aerial scenic view may also document a vanished resort. A downtown card may show an automobile dealership or theater. A highway photograph may contain a rare roadside business.

As with most RPPCs, the details at the edges of the image are sometimes where the real collector value is hiding.

Larger and hand-colored photographs

Rise Studio also sold larger photographic prints for display.

Some were hand tinted, following a popular tradition in tourist photography where color was manually added to a black-and-white photographic print. These larger pieces were suitable for homes, hotels, tourist businesses, and other places where a postcard-sized image would have been too small.

A documented auction result provides some sense of this separate market. A framed 19-by-13-inch hand-tinted Rise Studio photograph of Sylvan Lake, showing the lodge and several automobiles, sold for $400 at auction.

Again, that does not make every framed Rise photograph worth hundreds of dollars.

Size, original hand coloring, subject, condition, framing, age, and visual quality all matter. But it does show that larger Rise photographs should not simply be valued by multiplying the price of a postcard.

They belong to a different market.

Bill Groethe and the next generation

Rise also played a role in the career of another important South Dakota photographer.

Bill Groethe, later known for photographing Mount Rushmore and for his famous 1948 portrait of surviving participants from the Battle of the Little Bighorn, grew up in Rapid City. Smithsonian archival records identify Carl Rise and photographer Bert Bell as Groethe's early mentors.

That connection places Rise within a broader photographic tradition in Rapid City.

The Black Hills tourism industry needed photographers, and those photographers built businesses around a combination of portraiture, commercial work, postcards, scenic photographs, and regional documentation. Knowledge, equipment, customers, and negatives moved between studios and generations.

Rise helped establish that photographic culture before Groethe carried it much farther into the 20th century.

Identifying Rise Studio postcards

Most Rise cards are straightforward to recognize once you know the name.

Look for Rise, Rise Photo, or Rise Studio, Rapid City, S.D. within the image or on the reverse. Catalog numbers frequently accompany the caption. Cards with Rise Studio - Kirch should be attributed to William C. Kirch working through the studio rather than to Carl Rise personally.

A card that appears photographic should still be examined under magnification. A genuine RPPC will generally show continuous photographic tones rather than a regular halftone dot pattern.

The studio's long commercial life also means that photographs could be reprinted or reproduced later. A genuine Rise image is not necessarily an early photographic print simply because the negative itself dates to the 1920s or 1930s.

Photographic paper, postcard back, caption style, postmark, and physical printing process should all be considered.

Notes and market conditions from Northwest Postcards

Rise Studio real photo postcards are collectible, but many scenic views remain inexpensive.

Common cards showing Sylvan Lake, the Needles, Custer State Park, the Badlands, and other major Black Hills attractions are currently offered in roughly the $5 to $20 range. Individual examples can be found below that level, while especially clean or attractive scenic RPPCs may be offered somewhat higher. These are primarily dealer asking prices rather than a dependable record of completed sales.

The Rise name alone is therefore not enough to make a postcard valuable.

A common Sylvan Lake view may remain a common Sylvan Lake view even if Carl Rise made the negative.

The more interesting cards are those that move beyond ordinary Black Hills scenery. Mount Rushmore construction deserves special attention, particularly when workers, machinery, scaffolding, or a recognizable stage of carving is visible. Coolidge photographs, the 1934 stratosphere expedition, aviation, mining, unusual aerial views, named businesses, hospitals, early roads, automobile subjects, and uncommon Rapid City scenes all have potential crossover markets.

I would also pay close attention to cards depicting identifiable Indigenous people or events. These should be researched carefully rather than treated as generic "Indian" postcards. Correct identification, tribal affiliation, event, photographer, and historical context can matter both historically and commercially.

Larger photographs need to be evaluated separately. The documented $400 sale of a hand-colored Sylvan Lake photograph and the $687.50 Heritage result for the Coolidge panorama demonstrate that exceptional Rise material can reach well beyond ordinary postcard values.

The important lesson is the same one we see with many prolific regional studios:

The studio establishes attribution. The subject establishes value.

Collector's perspective

Rise Studio postcards can initially feel like ordinary Black Hills tourist cards.

There are plenty of mountains, highways, lakes, tunnels, rock formations, and finished views of Mount Rushmore.

But the studio happened to be operating in Rapid City during a remarkable period.

The automobile was transforming Western tourism. New roads were opening the Black Hills. Calvin Coolidge brought national attention to the region. Mount Rushmore was being blasted from an uncarved mountainside. Scientists and Army aviators were launching balloons toward the stratosphere from a natural bowl outside town.

Rise Studio photographed all of it.

That makes the catalog worth looking through slowly.

A common scenic card may remain worth only a few dollars. The next card in the box might show workers hanging from George Washington's face, a president in cowboy clothes, an experimental balloon crew preparing to enter the stratosphere, or a Rapid City business that disappeared eighty years ago.

The small Rise Studio credit in the corner is where the research starts.

Additional reading

• "Mount Rushmore Before Carving", National Park Service.
• "Workmen on Face of Geo. Washington, Mt. Rushmore", Library of Congress.
• "President Coolidge in Cowboy Outfit", Library of Congress.
• "Women's History Collection", South Dakota State Archives.
• "Benjamin B. Talley Papers", Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library.
• "Bill Groethe Photographs of Survivors of the Battle of Little Big Horn", Smithsonian Institution.
• "Mount Rushmore National Memorial Cultural Landscape", National Park Service.

Example postcards